Isabel Rivers, MA (Cantab) MA, PhD (Columbia)

 

Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture, School of English and Drama,Rivers Queen Mary, University of London, and Co-Director of the Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies


email: i.rivers@qmul.ac.uk


Isabel Rivers is a literary and intellectual historian of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with particular interests in the history of religion and philosophy and the history of the book. She taught for many years at the Universities of Leicester and Oxford before joining Queen Mary in 2004. She was an associate editor of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), to which she contributed articles on John Tillotson, Isaac Watts, and Philip Doddridge among others. She is currently writing Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720-1800. With David L. Wykes she has co-edited Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (2008) and Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (2011). They are co-editing A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860, with Richard Whatmore of the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Sussex as associate editor. She is Principal Investigator for the Dissenting Academies Project.

 

She is an Emeritus Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford.


Her publications of particular relevance to the history of dissent include:

  • 'Philip Doddridge's New Testament: The Family Expositor (1739–56)’, in The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (2010)
  • 'Religious Publishing', in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, 1695-1830, ed. Michael Suarez and Michael Turner (2009)
  • ‘Writing the History of Early Evangelicalism’, History of European Ideas, 35 (2009), 105-111
  • 'The First Evangelical Tract Society', Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 1-22
  • 'Joseph Williams of Kidderminster (1692-1755) and his Journal', Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, 7 (2005), 358-78
  • 'Religion and Literature', in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780, ed. John Richetti (2005)
  • 'John Wesley and Religious Biography', in John Wesley: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Jeremy Gregory, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 85 (2003), 209-26
  • The Defence of Truth through the Knowledge of Error: Philip Doddridge's Academy Lectures (2003)
  • 'Responses to Hume on Religion by Anglicans and Dissenters', Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 52 (2001), 675-95
  • 'Biographical Dictionaries and their Uses from Bayle to Chalmers', in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. I. Rivers (2001)
  • Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780, 2 vols. (1991-2000)
  • 'Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity', in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. I. Rivers (1982).