Dr Noah Millstone

Department of History
Senior Lecturer

Contact details

Address
Arts Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

My primary research interests are in the history of politics, religion, and the book in early modern Britain and Europe, especially but not exclusively c1598-1660.

Qualifications

  • PhD, Stanford University, 2011
  • AB, University of Chicago, 2004

Biography

I studied history as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. After working on a number of unsuccessful political campaigns, I studied for a PhD in early modern British history at Stanford University; for some time, I was based for a few years out of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Before coming to Birmingham, I spent three years as a postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University, and three more as a lecturer in early modern history at the University of Bristol.

Teaching

  • Practicing History
  • Making of the Modern World
  • State and Empire in the Early Modern World
  • Experts, Scholars, Spies: The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe
  • Writing Early Modern History

Postgraduate supervision

I would be happy to supervise students working on any early modern topic that overlaps with my research interests, such as history of reading and of the book, political history understood as broadly as possible, the history of subjectivities, and so on.


Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Research

I am currently director of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network, Europe’s Short Peace, 1595-1620. The network brings together fifty scholars from ten countries to build a transnational political, religious and cultural history of Europe between the peace of Vervins (1598) and the outbreak of the Bohemian revolt (1618). Please get in contact if you are interested in assisting the project!

I am also completing a monograph on the serpentine Welsh bishop John Williams (1582-1650), and am gradually gathering materials for a project on book talk and non-reading in early modern Europe.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Millstone, N 2016, Manuscript circulation and the invention of politics in early Stuart England. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, Cambridge University Press. <http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/9781107120723>

Article

Millstone, N 2023, 'Sir Robert Cotton, Manuscript Pamphleteering, and the Making of Jacobean Kingship during the Short Peace, ca. 1609–1613', Journal of British Studies, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 134-160. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2022.175

Millstone, N 2023, 'Special Forum: Handwriting and Power in Early Stuart England Introduction', Journal of British Studies, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 132-133. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.1

Millstone, N 2017, 'Designed for collection: early modern news and the production of history', Media History, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 177-198. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2017.1302323

Millstone, N 2014, 'Seeing Like a Statesman in Early Stuart England', Past & Present, vol. 223, no. 1, pp. 77-127. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu003

Millstone, N 2012, 'Historicising Common Sense', Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 529-543. https://doi.org/10.1007/2Fs12124-012-9222-y

Millstone, N 2011, 'Evil Counsel: The Propositions to Bridle the Impertinency of Parliament and the Critique of Caroline Government in the Late 1620s', Journal of British Studies, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 813-839. https://doi.org/10.1086/661000

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Millstone, N 2022, John Hacket's Scrinia Reserata and the oral history of early Stuart England. in WJ Bulman & FC Dominguez (eds), Political and religious practice in the early modern British World. Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, Manchester University Press. <https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526151353/political-and-religious-practice-in-the-early-modern-british-world/>

Millstone, N 2018, The Politic History of Early Stuart Parliaments. in Writing the History of Parliament in Tudor and Stuart England. Manchester University Press.

Chapter

Millstone, N 2020, Space, place and Laudianism in early Stuart Ipswich. in CR Kyle & J Peacey (eds), Connecting Centre and Locality: Political Communication in Early Modern England. Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, Manchester University Press, pp. 66–93. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526147165.00010

View all publications in research portal