Robert Ingram

Jack Miller Center Academic Advisory Council Member
Professor of Humanities and Associate Director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, University of Florida

Robert Ingram is Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education. For two decades he taught at Ohio University, where he was Professor of History and the founding director of the Menard Family George Washington Forum. Born and brought up in Ruston, Louisiana, he did his undergraduate work at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and his graduate work at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. Professor Ingram is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Professor in the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University.

His scholarly work focuses on the early history of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world, with particular focus on religion and politics. His most recent book is Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (2018). In addition to co-editing People Power: Popular Sovereignty from Machiavelli to Modernity (2022), Freedom of Speech, 1500–1850 (2020) and God in the Enlightenment (2016), he has published Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England (2007). With Jeff Collins, Raffaella Santi, Shannon Stimson and Sam Zeitlin, he edits a new book series on intellectual history called Ideas and Practices, 1300–1850 (Boydell/Durham University IMEMS Press). Ingram has also written for National Review, Modern Age, Claremont Review of Books and the University Bookman.

The two book projects on which he is now working are The World to Come: The Sacred and the Secular in England, 1660–1760, which examines the sacralisation of the modern state, and The Religion of the State: Sovereignty, Pluralism and Constitutionalism, 1890–1920, which focuses especially on the thought of Lord Acton’s literary executor and liberal political philosopher, J.N. Figgis (1866–1919). With Stephen Taylor and Hannah Smith, he is also engaged in producing a scholarly edition of the memoirs and correspondence of the Whig politician John Lord Hervey (1696–1743) which will be published by Oxford University Press. With James Vaughn, he is editing two books, one on Liberal Democracy and the Age of Revolution and the other on Capitalism: Histories.

Research interests:
Liberal democracy
Medieval studies
Religion and politics

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