Isabel Rivers, Ph.D., Research Professor, Queen Mary, University of London and Co-Director of the Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies
Isabel Rivers's research focuses on religion and philosophy and the history of the book in the long eighteenth century. Her books include Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, 2 vols (1991–2000); she has also edited Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (1982) and Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (2001), and published many articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, religion, and thought, on authors ranging from John Bunyan to David Hume. She was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, 2000-2003. She was an Associate Editor of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), responsible for theologians and freethinkers in the eighteenth century, and of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th edn (2009), responsible for classical and biblical contexts of English literature. Her student text book, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry, has been in print for over thirty years. She is currently writing Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England, 1720–1800.
With Dr David L. Wykes she is Co-Director of the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. They have co-edited Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (2008) and Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (2011). They are also co-editing A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860, with Knud Haakonssen and Richard Whatmore of the Centre for Intellectual History at the University of Sussex as associate editors. Rivers is Principal Investigator for the Research Project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, ‘A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860’, with Wykes, Haakonssen, and Whatmore as Co-Investigators (2008–11), and Principal Investigator for the Research Project funded by the AHRC Religion and Society Programme, ‘Dissenting Academy Libraries and their Readers, 1720-1860’, with Wykes as Project Partner (2009-11).
Before joining Queen Mary in 2004 she taught at the Universities of Oxford (1985-2004) and Leicester (1973-85). She is an Emeritus Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
Professor Rivers gave the 2008 MWRC Annual Lecture titled: 'John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards, with a focus on Wesley's edition of Edwards' The Life of David Brainerd.
