Our People

Prof Andrew Hopper

Fellow, Official Fellow

Professor of Social and Local History

Oxford Lifelong Learning

DPhil, MA, BA (York)

Andrew Hopper is Professor of Social and Local History in the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. He is a specialist on early modern England. He graduated at the University of York in 1993, before returning to complete a MA and doctoral thesis on the mobilisation of support for parliament in Yorkshire during the civil war. He has since taught History at the Universities of East Anglia, Birmingham, and most recently as Director of the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester. He now teaches on the Undergraduate Certificate in History, the Postgraduate Certificate in Historical Studies and the Masters of Studies in Historical Studies at Rewley House. He is especially keen to hear from potential doctoral students seeking to work on early modern British history.

He is the author of many books and articles on seventeenth-century England and the civil wars. He is best known for his two monographs ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007), andTurncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil Wars (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is keen to work with museums and schools on public engagement projects and was guest curator at the National Civil War Centre for their Battle-Scarred and World Turned Upside Down exhibitions.

From 2017–2023 he was the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project ‘Conflict, Welfare and Memory during and after the English Civil Wars’. The project examined how maimed soldiers and war widows of the civil wars claimed military pensions across England and Wales between 1642 and 1718. Research from this project is building towards his third monograph, under contract with Oxford University Press, as Widowhood and Bereavement during the English Civil Wars. He is co-editor of the popular free podcast, the World Turned Upside Down.