Kevin Sharpe (historian)


Kevin M. Sharpe was a British historian, Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, Leverhulme Research Professor and Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He is best known for his work on the reign of Charles I of England.

Education and career

Kevin Sharpe studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at St Catherine's College, Oxford, and from 1974 to 1978, he was a junior research fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. Formerly he was visiting Professor at Princeton, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology, the Australian National University and the Max Planck Institute, Göttingen. He was also lecturer at the University of Southampton, where he was awarded a personal chair in 1994. From 2001 he worked at the University of Warwick, and from 2005 at Queen Mary University of London.
During the late 1970s and 1980s, Sharpe, together with scholars such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky, was labelled a revisionist political historian for his criticism of the previous Whiggish narrative of the English Revolution. Particularly, Sharpe advocated a revisionist interpretation of the period in English history beginning from the Caroline period towards the English Revolution, suggesting that the English nation during the 1620s was not as divided as traditionally portrayed. As a leading revisionist, he welcomed the shift towards increased role of literary and artistic representations in the chronicle of early modern politics.

Publications

Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England, Bloomsbury, 2013 Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660, Yale University Press, 2010, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth Century England, YUP, 2009, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2000, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, Yale University Press, 2000, The Personal Rule of Charles I, Yale University Press, 1992, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I, CUP, 1987, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586–1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England, OUP, 1979,
As editor:
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Honours