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 new 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 forms of belief across the Latin, Greek and Arabic cultures of the medieval world.  

Current Projects

I am researching religious missions to the Greenlandic and Canadian Arctic and 19th century missions to seamen.

Contact details

Teaching

I teach a range of courses for undergraduates and postgraduates in areas of my research expertise. This year I am contributing to HIST10048 The Modern World, HIST20120 Outlaws and HISTM0017 Themes in the History of Colonialism. I am convening HIST30122 Global Empires in tb2.

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.