Researcher biography

BA (Hons), LLB, PhD (Melbourne)

Leigh Penman is a UQ Postdoctoral Fellowship holder (2013-2016) and an Associate Member of the History Faculty, University of Oxford. He graduated with degrees in arts and law from the University of Melbourne. His doctoral thesis, concerning millenarian thought in early seventeenth-century Germany, was undertaken at Melbourne in association with the former Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph Unanticipated Millenniums: Chiliastic Thought in Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 1600–1630 (Springer), as well as several translations, and more than two dozen articles on aspects of early-modern intellectual and religious history. He has previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford (2009-2011), where he worked on the correspondence of Samuel Hartlib as part of the Cultures of Knowledge Project, and a research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2011-2012.

His current research interests encompass networks of heterodox thinkers imagined and virtual communities in seventeenth-century Europe, and the instrumentalisation of early modern historical events in modern popular and political culture. At CHED, he will pursue a research project concerning Dissenting Religious Subcultures in Protestant Northern Europe, focussing on particular on transnational networks of heterodox thinkers and sympathisers which coalesced around figures like Ludwig Friedrich Gifftheil, Paul Felgenhauer, Samuel Hartlib and Johann Permeier.

Featured projects Duration
Science and Secularization
ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship
20142019
The Fire World: Toward an intellectual biography of the German Philosopher Jacob Bohme (1575-1624) (2015)
UQ Early Career Researcher
2015

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