Dr Michelle Pfeffer

Subject: History

Department: History

Academic position: Senior Demy

Contact

michelle.pfeffer@magd.ox.ac.uk

Background

I received my BA in History from The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia and my MSc in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Harris Manchester College, Oxford, for which I was awarded the Charles Webster Prize. My PhD in History, supported by the Australian Research Council, was awarded by UQ in 2020. Before joining Magdalen as a Prize Fellow in Early Modern History, I taught history and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at UQ. I have also been a Lisa Jardine History of Science scholar at the Royal Society of London. I am the winner of the 2021 John Bunyan Society Early Career Prize.

Research

I am an early modern historian with research interests in the history of science, religion, and scholarship. I am currently working on three projects. First, I am finishing a monograph on the history of the idea of the soul in early modern England, focusing particularly on the development of the heterodox view that humans did not possess immortal souls. The early modern debate over this issue was an interdisciplinary one: it involved religion, medicine, and natural philosophy, but also historical scholarship. Building on this work, I am also writing a ‘biography’ of William Warburton’s classic Divine Legation of Moses (1738-41), a book about the biblical Hebrews’ belief in immortality that despite being a highly technical work of scholarship became a public sensation in the mid-eighteenth century.

Another key interest is the history of astrology in the early modern world. I’m writing about the process by which astrology, once a vibrant aspect of cultural and intellectual life, came to be rejected as a superstition outside the bounds of science – a huge shift that remains a major puzzle in the history of science. My main interest is the contribution of late humanist scholarship to this shift and to ‘disenchantment’ more broadly. In 2021, I organised (with Jan Machielsen and Robin Briggs) an interdisciplinary conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sir Keith Thomas’s classic Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), which was supported by the Past & Present Society; recordings of the event can be found here. I’m also interested in the fact that the marginalization of astrology was a pan-European as well as a global phenomenon – in that it was also felt in European colonies around the world – and I am in the early stages of working on the marginalisation of astrology in New Spain.

I’m also interested in the history of epidemics. I am currently writing about the role played by astrologers in early I’m also interested in the history of epidemics. I have written about the role played by astrologers in early modern ‘public health’, and a recording of a public lecture I gave at Magdalen on this topic can be found here. I have also curated an exhibition on the history of epidemics at Magdalen in the College’s Old Library, which is running from February to July 2023. The online version of the exhibition can be accessed here. I also contributed to a virtual tour of the Old Library that can be found here.

With the anthropologist David Zeitlyn, I am curating a major exhibition at the Bodleian Library on divination and astrology across the world and throughout history. The exhibition will open in winter 2024 and will be accompanied by an edited collection contracted with Bodleian Library Publishing.