Dr Sarah Ward

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  • Qualifications:BA (Hons), MPhil, DPhil (Oxon), FRHistS, FHEA
  • Position:Associate Professor in History
  • Department:Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education (ACE)
  • Telephone:+4411732 83085
  • Email:Sarah9.Ward@uwe.ac.uk

About me

I am Associate Professor of Early Modern History. My research interests range from the secret activities of Interregnum ejected clergy to the lives of Welsh royalists and Jacobites in the seventeenth century. I am interested in the reasons why royalists and episcopalian clergy continued to resist the regimes of 1646-1660, and the political and religious cultures associated with their resistance. Another strand of my research concerns the development of news culture in early modern England and Wales, including issues of 'fake news'. 


I'm also active in public history. My most recent work was on a collaborative NHLF-funded project '1000 Years of Calm' at Brecon Cathedral, a collaboration with Mind, the cathedral, UWE students, and local historians., for which I was project manager. I have published on royalist ballads, Welsh royalism, seventeenth-century autobiographical and biographical writing, and my monograph, Royalism, Religion, and Revolution: Wales, 1640-1688 is published with Boydell & Brewer (2021). I am interested in interdisciplinary research, and have worked with literary specialists and theologians in the past. I have featured on BBC Radio 4's 'Long View' and on the forthcoming BBC2 television series 'The Union'.

I received my BA in History from the University of Durham in 1999, my MPhil from the University of Birmingham in 2006, and my doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2017. Between my MPhil and DPhil I taught A level and IB History, was a senior examiner for two A level examination boards, and wrote five A level textbooks. I have been awarded fellowships from the Institute for Historical Research (Royal Historical Society Centenary Fellowship), the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Gladstone's Library. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2021, and have been awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Early Career Fellowship while at UWE.

Area of expertise

My areas of expertise are early modern British history, specifically the political and religious culture of seventeenth-century England and Wales. I would welcome PhD applications within this area. I am happy to be contacted by media organisations in relation to these and other early modern British history topics.

Publications

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