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Kirsten Macfarlane

Kirsten Macfarlane
Contact

Emailkmacfarlane@uchicago.edu

Areas of Study and Research

History of Christianity

Curriculum Vita

Faculty Associate Professor of Early Modern Religious and Intellectual History; also in the History Faculty; also in the College

A scholar of early modern Europe and North America, Prof. Macfarlane works at the intersection of religious, cultural, and intellectual history. She has a particular interest in the history of biblical scholarship, encompassing its production by Latin-speaking scholarly elites, its interactions with vernacular religious culture, and its relationship with theological controversy and confessional identity.

This interest unites much of her research, including her first book on the Elizabethan Hebraist Hugh Broughton (Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy, published with Oxford University Press in 2021); her co-edited volume with Joanna Weinberg and Piet van Boxel on the early modern reception of the Mishnah (published in 2022 in the Oxford-Warburg Series); and her second monograph on the relationship between erudition and piety in an exceptional community of early immigrants to Massachusetts (Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World, Oxford University Press, 2024).

Lay Learning and the Bible was awarded the 2025 Roland H. Bainton Religion and Theology Book Prize from The Sixteenth Century Society: you can hear Macfarlane discuss the book here and here.

She is currently working on her third monograph on the study of Hebrew in North America from the colonial period through to the dawn of the nineteenth century. Entitled ‘American Hebraism 1640-1800’, this book is under contract with Harvard University Press.

Before arriving at the University of Chicago, Macfarlane served as an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, where she also received her BA, MSt, and DPhil. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from Trinity College, Cambridge; the Houghton Library; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies; the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study; KU Leuven; Lund University; and the Library Company of Philadelphia. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources and is an elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

She has a joint appointment in the History Faculty and is a member of the Faculty Board of the Nicholson Center for British Studies.