• Maurice Lee
  • Professor Emeritus of History

Maurice D. Lee, Jr., the Margaret A. Judson Professor emeritus of History at Rutgers, died on July 11, 2020.  He was a couple of months shy of his 95th birthday. 

Mo was a prolific and distinguished historian of early modern British—in particular, Scottish—history.  His pathbreaking series of monographs on Scottish politics from the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots in the 1560s to the Covenanters’ revolt against Charles I in 1637, laid the critical foundations for a more properly “British” approach to the origins and nature of what used to be called “The English Revolution”.  Mo published widely too on early modern diplomatic history—including an important book on Anglo-French relations in the early seventeenth-century—as well as on English and Scottish history after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. 

He was educated at Princeton as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and, after teaching for some years at Princeton and then the University of Illinois, Mo joined the Douglass College History department at Rutgers in 1966/67, and went on to chair the department.  He was appointed to the Judson professorship—named in honor of his distinguished predecessor in Tudor-Stuart history at Douglass College—in 1987.  He received an honorary doctorate from St. Andrews in 1994, and two years later retired from Rutgers.  Mo continued to teach classes for the department in Reformation and English Constitutional history for some years after his retirement, and he continued to research and publish for many years thereafter.

Click HERE for an obituary published by the American Historical Association (AHA).