People

Portrait (head shot photo)
Alastair Bellany
Professor of History and Department Chair
Degree: Ph.D., Princeton University B.A. (First Class Honours), Oxford University
Rutgers : At Rutgers Since 1996
Specialty: Early Modern British Isles: Political and Media History
Email: bellany@history.rutgers.edu
Office: 101B Van Dyck Hall
Phone: 848-932-8343
Research Interests: My research focuses primarily on the political culture of early modern England, in particular the histories of media, popular politics and the image of the early Stuart court. I am currently at work on a series of projects, including an essay on the “many bodies” of King James VI and I; a textbook for Oxford UP on the history of the Britannic Isles to 1715; and a socio-cultural history of a late Stuart hanging ballad and its English and American afterlives.

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

Undergraduate

  • 510:231 A History of the Britannic Isles
  • 510:245 SAS Signature Course, The Arts of Power: Ritual, Myth and Propaganda from the Emperor Augustus to the Age of Wikileaks
  • 510:342 Reformation England, 1485-1603
  • 510:344 Revolutionary England, 1603-1714
  • 510:345 The English Revolution, 1640-60
  • Byrne First Year Seminars: "How to Read a Verse Libel"; "My name It is Jack Hall: Transatlantic Histories of a Hanging Ballad"; and "From Gallows Tree to Lethal Injection: Capital Punishment in Historical Perspective"

Graduate

  • 510:603 Colloquium in Early Modern British History
  • 510:597 PDR in Early Modern European History

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  • The Murder of King James I, (Yale UP: New Haven and London, 2015), co-written with Thomas Cogswell
  • The Politics of Court Scandal In Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603-1660, (Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 2002).
  • Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources (Early Modern Literary Studies: Texts Series I (2005)), co-edited with Andrew McRae
  • "Thinking With Poison", in Malcolm Smuts (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2016)
  • “Libel”, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (Oxford UP: Oxford, 2011)
  • “Buckingham Engraved: Politics, Print Images and the Royal Favourite in the 1620s”, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain (Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, 2010)
  • “The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early Seventeenth Century England”, Past and Present 200 (2008)
  • “‘Naught But Illusion’?: Buckingham’s Painted Selves”, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (eds.), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2008)
  • “Railing Rhymes Revisited: Libels, Scandal and Early Stuart Politics”, History Compass 5:4 (2007).

AWARDS

  • 2017: Rutgers University Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research
  • 2016: Co-winner, Book Prize of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies (for The Murder of King James I)
  • 2012: ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship (held during 2013)
  • 2009: Seminar Director, Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library
  • 2003: Rutgers University Board of Trustees' Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence
  • 2000: Rutgers University FAS Award for Distinguished Contribution to Undergraduate Education
  • 1994: Whiting Fellowship
  • 1987: Brackenbury Scholarship, Balliol College, Oxford

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS AND ACTIVITIES

  • AHA
  • North American Conference on British Studies
  • NACBS Program Committee 2015-17
  • General Editor, series on Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, Manchester University Press