I’m spending the year studying US and comparative constitutional law at Yale Law School courtesy of a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship.  The major focus of my current research touches on the cultural and legal history of the separation of church and state;  this project is moving towards a book entitled “The Invention of Civil Religion: Church and State in Post-Revolutionary England and America.” A published article “The Invention of Criminal Blasphemy: Rex v. Taylor (1676)” is an indication of the kind of work I’m pursuing at this moment. A second piece on religion and toleration in New England war narratives is soon to be published as “King Philip’s War and the Edges of Civil Religion in 1670s London,” in a collection edited by Tom Corns and Tony Claydon, Religion, Culture and the National Community in the 1670s (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 2009). I have some general-interest writing on this topic in press, such as God Help the Queen! in a July issue of The  New Statesman.

Other odds and ends on my desk:

a review of Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds by Carole Levin and John Watkins

an article on the nexus of race and religion in contemporary England