Our People
Dr Fiona McCall
Fellow, Ordinary Fellow
Departmental Lecturer in Local & Social History
Department for Continuing Education
DPhil, MSt (Oxon), PGCert (West of England), BSc (Durham), BA (OU), MSc (Sheffield)
Dr Fiona McCall, DPhil (Lady Margaret Hall, 2008), joined the Department of Continuing Education as a part-time departmental lecturer in local history in November 2015. She is an early modern historian specialising in sixteenth and seventeenth-century religious and social history. Her work focuses on anti-clericalism, religious conflict, family and memory within parishes during and after the English Civil war and interregnum. Her book on the experiences of loyalist clergy and their families during this period: Baal’s Priests: the Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (Ashgate Press, 2013) was commended by judges of the 2013 Samuel Pepys Prize. Her most recently published paper looked at the experiences of clergy in Leicestershire, a county at the heart of Civil War conflict, using parliamentary committee records in the Walker Archive in the Bodleian Library. A book chapter on royalist humour against the interregnum church and clergy is forthcoming soon. Her longer-term research project, funded by the British Academy, looks at loyalist resistance to the religious changes of the 1640s and 1650s within individual parishes, using local quarter sessions records and churchwardens’ accounts. She is also a collaborator with Professor Helen Parish, Dr Felicity Heal and Professor Ralph Houlbrooke on a University of Oxford/University of Reading Leverhulme-funded project to produce a modern edition of Archbishop Matthew Parker’s 1561 survey of the Elizabethan clergy for the Church of England Record Society.
She has been a tutor for the Department of Continuing Education since 2009, firstly as a weekly class tutor, where she taught courses on the English Civil War, Crime and Punishment and on John Aubrey. She currently tutors on the Online Advanced Diploma in Local History, where she is very inspired by the diverse talents of the students she teaches from around the globe.
As well as working for the department, she is also a part-time lecturer in early modern history for the University of Portsmouth. She previously taught sixteenth and seventeenth century history at Newman University in Birmingham and at the University of Reading. She did her (second) first degree with the Open University, after a first degree in Physics from the University of Durham, when she was a finalist in University Challenge in a year too long ago to mention. She had a subsequent career as an information manager in industry and as a university librarian. In what little spare time she has, along with contributing to her own history blog (http://fionamccall.tumblr.com/) she is keen on most things cultural, especially art, literature and music.
Publications
Baal’s Priests: the Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (Ashgate, 2013), monograph based on my thesis, was published by Ashgate in their St Andrews Studies in Reformation History series. In October 2013 this book was shortlisted for the Samuel Pepys Prize.
‘Continuing civil war by other means: royalist mockery of the interregnum church’, in Mark Knights, Adam Morton (eds), The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain c.1520-1820: Contestation and Construction (Boydell, forthcoming, 2016)
‘Scandalous and malignant?: Settling scores against the Leicestershire clergy after the first Civil War’, Midland History, 40 (2, Autumn 2015), pp. 220–242
‘The Religious Settlement of Elizabeth I: 1559-1571: Did it providing a lasting solution to England’s religious divisions?’, Modern History Review, 17 (3, February 2015), pp. 18-22
‘Children of Baal: Clergy Families and Their Memories of Sequestration’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 76 (4, 2013), pp. 617-38
The Parker Certificates, Church of England Record Society (forthcoming)
‘The King’s Smuggler: Jane Whorwood, Secret Agent to Charles I’, Oxoniensia, 76 (2011), p. 294 (Book Review)