David N. Hempton

David N. Hempton

Dean of the Faculty of Divinity ON LEAVE SPRING 2021
Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies
John Lord O'Brian Professor of Divinity
David N. Hempton

BA, Queen's University (Belfast)
PhD, University of St. Andrews

David Hempton joined the Faculty of Divinity in spring 2007, and has offered courses through FAS since fall of 2008. In July of 2012, he was appointed Dean of the Divinity School. Prior to joining Harvard, he was University Professor and Professor of the History of Christianity at Boston University, and prior to that appointment, he was the Professor of Modern History and director of the School of History in the Queen's University of Belfast.

He is a social historian of religion with particular expertise in populist traditions of evangelicalism in Europe, North America, and beyond. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In recent years he has delivered the F. D. Maurice Lectures at King's College London, held a fellowship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was HDS's outstanding teacher of the year in 2008. He is the author of many articles and books, including Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750-1850 (Stanford, 1984), winner of the Whitfield prize of the Royal Historical Society; Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740-1890 (Routledge, 1992); Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1996); The Religion of the People (Routledge, 1996); "Faith and Enlightenment," in the New Oxford History of the British Isles (Oxford, 2002); Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale, 2005); Evangelical Disenchantment (Yale, 2008); and The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (Tauris, 2011). He has research and teaching interests in religion and political culture, identity and ethnic conflict, the interdisciplinary study of lived religion, comparative secularization in Europe and North America, the history and theology of Evangelical Protestantism, and the rise of global Christianity in the early modern period.

Dean Hempton is not currently teaching.

Contact Information

Harvard Divinity School
45 Francis Avenue
Cambridge MA 02138

office hours: see Harvard Divinity School
p: 617-495-4513

Profile Type

Methodologies and Approaches