Recent Publications and Current Research

Recent publications include Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London (Stanford University Press, 1997), and three edited books: Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll (University Press of Mississippi, 2003); The Country and The City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), co-edited with Gerald MacLean and Donna Landry; and Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford University Press, 1999), co-edited with Muriel C. McClendon and Michael MacDonald.

My current research examines two aspects of early modern London. The first, "From State to Nation: Londoners, Education, and Provincial Reform in Early Modern England and Wales," addresses London's influence on national culture from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, with a focus on the relationships generated by the management of twenty-five provincial grammar schools by London-based trustees. Initial findings have been published in "Godliness, Commemoration, and Community: the Management of Provincial Schools by London Trade Guilds," in McClendon, Ward, and MacDonald, eds., Protestant Identities, pp. 141-57 and 323-26; and in Newton E. Key and Joseph P. Ward, "'Divided into parties': Exclusion Crisis Origins in Monmouth," The English Historical Review 115, no. 464 (November, 2000), pp. 1159-1183. The second aspect of my research concerns the international influences on early modern London's culture, which were visible in such contexts as the Reformation, the Renaissance, the movement of goods and people to and through London, and the activities of London-based merchants. This work will appear in a book whose current title is "Cultural Exchange in Early Modern London."

   Recent Course Offerings   (History 101, 102, 370, 490)

Professor Ward
Office hours: by appointment
Bishop 310
915-7148
jward@olemiss.edu