Professor Hilary M Carey

I am a religious and cultural historian.  My major research interests lie in the history of religion and imperialism particularly within the transnational boundaries of the nineteenth-century British empire. I am interested in big historical questions such as how religion serves to tie empires together (or tear them apart) and different sites of mission-led settler colonialism. I have written about the history of religious orders, missions and missionaries, missionary linguistics, the history of the colonial Bible and 'colonial' missions to British settler colonies. My most recent book, Empire of Hell, winner of the Kay Daniels prize, provides a religious history of the campaign to end the transportation of British and Irish convicts.

I trained initially as a medieval historian at the University of Oxford and I continue to retain an interest in the history of comparative religions, empires and forms of belief across the Latin, Greek and Arabic global cultures.  

Current Projects

Funded: AHRC Standard Grant AH/W009803/1. 'Mariners: Religion, race and empire in British Ports, 1801-1914' (with Co-I Sumita Mukherjee), 2022-2025.

I am also researching the history of the global bible, the movement to translate the bible into to the languages of the whole world. 

Contact details

Teaching

I teach a range of courses for undergraduates and postgraduates in areas of my research expertise including  HIST20120 Outlaws, HIST30122 Global Empires and HISTM0017 Themes in the History of Colonialism.

Research supervision

I am happy to supervise postgraduates in the fields of imperial religious history, histories of settler colonialism and topics in religious history more widely.