Simon Mills, BA (University of Wales, Bangor) MA (Manchester) PhD (London)

Visiting Research Fellow, Dr Williams's Centre

Simon Mills is a Mellon/Newton Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, and a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. His current research exlores the careers of the chaplains who served the English Levant Company at Aleppo, Syria between 1620 and 1760, and the ways in which the first-hand knowledge of the languages, religions, antiquities, geography, flora, and fauna of the Levant acquired by the chaplains impacted on the development of biblical and oriental studies in Britain.

His wider research interests lie in the religious, cultural, and intellectual history of the period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the history of biblical and oriental studies, the intersections between theological and philosophical thought, and the means by which knowledge was circulated in the early modern world.

He has edited a selection of Joseph Priestley’s letters to the Unitarian minister Theophilus Lindsey for the Centre’s website, and is a contributor to the forthcoming A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860, for which he is writing chapters on the teaching of ‘Pneumatology’ as part of the academies’ philosophy curriculum and on the connections between the English academies and the Scottish universities. He has written eight articles for Dissenting Academies Online: Database and Encyclopedia.

Between 2005 and 2009 he was an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Holder at the Dr Williams’s Centre. In 2010-11 he was British Institute Scholar at the Council for British Research in the Levant, and in April 2011 a British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies/Bodleian Libraries Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Book, University of Oxford.

His other publications include:

‘Scripture and Heresy in the Biblical Studies of Nathaniel Lardner and Joseph Priestley’, Dissent and the Bible in Britain, 1650-1950, ed. Scott Mandelbrote and Michael Ledger-Lomas (forthcoming)
‘The English Chaplains at Aleppo: Exploration and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1620–1760’, Bulletin of the Council for British Research in the Levant, 6.1 (2011), 13-20
‘Joseph Priestley’s connections with Catholics and Jews’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 24.3 (2009), 176-191
‘Aspects of a Polymath: Unveiling J. T. Rutt’s Edition of Joseph Priestley’s Letters to Theophilus Lindsey’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 24 (2008), 24-53