Contact Information:

Room: H309
Telephone: 02476 574690
Email: m.j.knights@warwick.ac.uk

Academic Profile

• PhD (1990) Oxford University
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Member of the Editorial Board of Parliamentary History
• Project Champion for the JISC funded Virtual Research Environment for the History of Political Discourse 1500-1800
• Principal Investigator for a British Academy funded project to explore words and concepts in early modern Britain

Undergraduate Modules Taught   

• Georgian Britain (Hi145a)
• The Birth of Modern Society? Britain 1660-1720 (HI31G)

Postgraduate Modules Taught

• Authority and Ideology in Early Modern England. (This module is taught jointly with colleagues at Hull University). For details click here

Selected Publications

• Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (OUP, 2005 hardback, 2006 paperback)
• The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677-1691 vol 5 (Boydell and Brewer, 6 vols, vol. 6 2007)
• many entries in The House of Commons 1690-1715 (eds. Hayton, Cruickshanks and Handley, CUP 2002)
• Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-1681 (CUP, 1994)

Research

I work on the political culture of early modern Britain c.1500 - c.1800, with particular interests in the integration of political and social history, the nature of public discourse, the role of print, and the interaction of politics, literature and ideas. I am currently researching:

• The history of early modern words and concepts - for more details about the project see http://www.earlymoderntexts.org/MA/index.html
• Early modern petitioning
• Booksellers and the freedom of the press in early modern Britain
• John Locke and the franchise
• Stereotypes
• Parliamentary rhetoric and the dissemination of news
• Corruption in early modern Britain
• Britain's revolutions 1640-1800
• Whigs and Witches: a microhistory of the birth of modernity
• The works of Henry Booth, earl of Warrington
• The memoirs of an early eighteenth century rake

Recent Research Topics Supervised (PhD, MA)

• Dr Gaby Mahlberg: Henry Neville and English Republicanism in the Seventeenth Century (PhD 2005)
• Julie Atkinson: A Social History of New York Politics 1731-1776 (PhD in progress)
• Linda Waterman-Holly: Private Interest and the Public Good in Seventeenth Century England (PhD in progress)
• Numerous MA disseratations on aspects of early modern history, including 'the self in the eighteenth century', 'the eighteenth century rogue', 'early modern counsel', 'the political discourse of immigration' and 'early modern iconoclasm'.