Colin Donnelly, Ph.D.

Dr. Donnelly is drawn to the contradictions and tensions in history; the blind alleys and overlooked stories of people or ideas that don’t quite fit with the traditional narrative. He seeks to integrate these neglected figures into both his teaching and research.

Before coming to VTS, Donnelly attained a BA (1st class) and MPhil (with Distinction) from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from Durham University, where his research focused on a key group of early English reformers at the University of Cambridge. Far from seeing them as the font of what one scholar called ‘the English Protestant tradition’, Donnelly argued that they embraced far more diverse and radical theologies which were ultimately rejected by the English state church. Following his PhD, Donnelly worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Early Modern History at the University of Limerick, studying the history of conflict and deviance at universities in the Holy Roman Empire. His next project, now in its early phases, will be a study of the evolution in the understanding of the soul between roughly 1500 and 1700, and will seek to demonstrate that early Reformation debates about the afterlife, often regarded as too esoteric to merit serious historical study, in fact had dramatic consequences for the political and philosophical revolutions of the 17th century.

Outside the office Dr. Donnelly enjoys chess, church crawling, and writing in the third person.