Professor Phil Withington

Department of History, The University of Sheffield

View Phil’s staff profile at The University of Sheffield

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Co-director

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Phil is currently working on a number of projects related to his broad interest in the history of intoxicants and intoxication. He is also researching various aspects of early modern political culture and developing a project to produce the first properly historicized ‘early modern dictionary’. The ESRC has recently awarded him £730,000 to run a three-year research project on ‘Intoxicants and Early Modernity, starting in October 2013 (ESRC Pre-Grant K00493X/1). In the meantime, he is in the early stages of a new book on the social history of the English Renaissance.

Between 2007 and 2010 a Research Fellowship from the ESRC kick-started his current research into intoxicants as both trans-historical phenomena and as drivers of cultural, social, economic and political change in early modern Britain. It also allowed him to research the relationship between early modernity and the development of theories and practices of ‘society’, resulting in Society in Early Modern England: the Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge, Polity, 2010).