Jonathan Reimer is delighted to serve as the Faculty Senate Moderator.  He is an Associate Professor of History who teaches in the History Department, where he holds the John H. Van Gorden Chair, and the Templeton Honors College.     

He is a specialist in early modern history who is particularly fascinated by the web of religious, political, and social changes that we call the English Reformation.  His current research examines the printers, preachers, and politicians who radically transformed British religion and culture in the wake of Henry VIII’s famous break with Rome.  An avid reader and writer, his publications (rather like his period of study) combine history, theology, and bibliography.  They can be found in journals like Church History, Reformation, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, The Journal of World History, The Library, Notes & Queries, and Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society.  He is presently finishing (deo volente) his first book on the biography and writing of the Tudor clergyman and bestselling devotional author Thomas Becon (1512-1567), which is under contract with Princeton University Press.

Before joining the faculty at Eastern, he taught at St Mark’s and Corpus Christi College in Vancouver, Canada, and at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge, England.  He was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Society for Renaissance Studies.  He lives just outside Philadelphia in Narberth, Pennsylvania, with his fiercely intelligent and inexhaustibly interesting wife, Thea (herself a writer and theologian), their wonderfully curious young son, Thomas, and their imperious yet lovable cat, Mollie.