About

Scott Sowerby is an associate professor in the Department of History at Northwestern University. He completed his PhD in History at Harvard University in 2006, during which he conducted three years of archival research in Europe supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Sowerby specializes in the history of early modern Britain and Europe, focusing on comparative history and transnational issues such as religious toleration, state formation, and cosmopolitanism. His first book, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution, published by Harvard University Press in 2013, received the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize for the best first book on British history. His research interests include religious heterodoxy, exile movements, Enlightenment thought, and the comparative military history of European states.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Library science
• Law

Selected publications

• Evan Haefeli, ed. <i>Against Popery: Britain, Empire, and Anti-Catholicism</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2022-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Why study anti-Catholicism? The concept has proved useful to a wide array of historians. With the retreat of Marxist theories of history in the 1970s and 1980s, historians of revolution found in anti-Catholicism an explanation for why English people rallied against their kings in the revolutions of 1649 and 1688: it was religious tensions, not class conflicts, that drove these events. Historians investigating the rise of national identity saw anti-Catholicism as a magnet around which concepts of nationhood could coalesce in Protestant lands. Lately, as historians of Europe have shifted their collective gaze to global and imperial history, anti-Catholicism has remained relevant. It has helped, for instance, to explain how British colonists distinguished themselves from their French and Spanish rivals. For all sorts of historians interested in what the Germans call Feindbilder, or images of the enemy, anti-Catholicism has served as a classic example of collective antipathy, similar to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The boom in studies of anti-Catholicism might be traced back to Edward Said’s Orientalism of 1978: to study it is to apprehend how Protestants perceived “the other.”

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: The State Trials in Historical Perspective

  2021-08-06 · 1 citations

  otherSenior author
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• Abbreviations

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2021-04-27

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author
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• Introduction: The State Trials in Historical Perspective

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2021-12-31

  book-chapterSenior author
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• Enforcing Uniformity: Public Reactions to the Seven Bishops’ Trial

  2021-08-06 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Introduction:

  Boydell UK eBooks · 2021-08-06

  book-chapterSenior author
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• Enforcing Uniformity:

  Boydell UK eBooks · 2021-08-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Select bibliography

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Library science
  DOI

• 7 Enforcing Uniformity: Public Reactions to the Seven Bishops’ Trial

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2021-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Trading toleration for troops

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  Catholics fought on both the royalist and parliamentarian sides during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, as both sides skirted religious tests meant to deprive Catholics of access to arms in a rush to win the war. The force of necessity provided leverage to the Catholic minority, as their wartime service enabled them to press for religious liberties they had been unable to secure in peacetime. Though these efforts ultimately failed, the negotiations over Catholic toleration during the Civil Wars demonstrate that, under the right circumstances, a minority group could wield a surprising amount of power in a divided society.

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Frequent coauthors

• Eleanor Hubbard

  Film Independent

  17 shared

• Paul D. Halliday

  University of Virginia

  17 shared

• William Gibson

  3 shared

• Brian Cowan

  McGill University

  2 shared

• David L. Wykes

  2 shared

• H. Nicholson

  1 shared

• Alice Taylor

  Bond University

  1 shared

• Jeremy Gregory

  University of Nottingham

  1 shared

Labs

• Material History LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., History

  University of California, Berkeley

  1990

• M.A., History

  University of California, Berkeley

  1985

• B.A., History

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1983

Awards & honors

• Royal Historical Society's Whitfield Prize for the best firs…
• shortlisted for Phi Beta Kappa's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award
• Weinberg College Award for Distinguished Teaching (2014)