Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch

Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch

Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church

Emeritus Fellow
 

Diarmaid MacCulloch, DD, FBA, FRHistS, FSA, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, and prize-winning author, has written extensively on the sixteenth century and beyond it. His History of Christianity: the first three thousand years (Penguin/Allen Lane) and the BBC TV series based on it first appeared in 2009; the book won the Cundill Prize, then the world’s largest prize for history, in 2010. His three-part TV series for BBC2, How God made the English, aired in March 2012, and his BBC2 series, Sex and the Church, aired in early 2015. He has written Silence: a Christian History (2013) and his collected essays on the Reformation appeared as All Things New: Writings on the Reformation in 2016. His Thomas Cromwell: a Life was published in 2018, and his Lower than the Angels: a History of Sex and Christianity in 2024.   

Research Interests

I’m a passionate believer in the need for the academic disciplines of the humanities to communicate their value and their discussions to the widest possible public audience. It is for that reason that I worked as Vice-President of the British Academy for Public Engagement, in our creative and expanding programme of public events, lectures and debates nationwide. With that aim, I have presented my own work not merely in the lecture-hall and in published work, but on radio, on television and in podcasts. My own speciality over nearly fifty years has been the Reformation, and in particular the English Reformation.

My wider work is on the history of Christianity generally. My mission is to explain its complicated history in ways which inhibit glib statements of the story to back up crude and authoritarian-minded presentations of Christian faith, and I seek to promote sane and wise relationships with other faith communities and with a world of scepticism beyond them. I have a particular interest in Christianity’s changing views on gender and sexuality, which I made the subject of a three-part BBC TV series I presented in 2015. In my public communication, I have a particular interest in involving the young, and enjoy talking to sixth-formers; this is part of my continuing interest and involvement in the lively literary festival scene across the world.  I have lectured to public audiences as far apart as Sweden, Germany, Canada, the United States and India, including a lunchtime meeting of members of the European Parliament in Brussels in March 2018. 

My work in seeking to bring understanding of the problems and opportunities of religious belief was recognised by the award of the Dr Leopold Lucas Prize for 2019 by the University of Tübingen (previous winners include the President of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Dalai Lama), and my contribution to scholarship was specified in the citation for my knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012.