Joshua Rushton

Profile

I am a social and cultural historian of early modern religious life with a focus on Catholicism and Italy. I joined the History Department in 2024 as Lecturer in Early Modern History. I completed my BA in History and MA in Renaissance Studies at the University of Warwick and was awarded my PhD by the University of Leeds in 2023. My doctoral project, funded by the AHRC, examined the relationship between urban devotional life, Catholic Reform, and sacred immanence in the city of Venice. In 2024 I held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Leeds where I began revising my thesis into a monograph under the working title Encountering the Sacred in Early Modern Venice, 1500-1750.

In 2026, I will take up a 3-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship working on the project 'Catholic Renewal and Environmental change in the Early Modern World'.

Research interests

My research focuses on understanding how early modern religious change was understood and experienced. I connect my study of early modern Catholicism to broader cultural and spiritual shifts such as changes in Christian worldviews, assumptions about the nature of the holy, and more recently, environmental change. I have broader interests in the history of print, the European Reformations, and environmental humanities. 

Recent Publications

Journal articles 

'The Emotional Dimension of Shrine Formation in Early Modern Catholicism’, Cultural and Social History (Early View - 2024) https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2024.2424361

‘Nourishing Catholic souls in post-Tridentine miracle narratives’, Renaissance Studies (Early View - 2024) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rest.12943

Teaching and Student Education

I am passionate about engaging my students with the early modern world and the discipline of history more generally. My teaching makes robust use of primary sources including the excellent holdings of the Manchester Museum and John Rylands Research Institute and Library. I am an Associate Fellow of Advance HE and work to incorporate pedagogical innovation into my History teaching, particularly in the area of academic skills development. I teach on all levels of the BA History programme and contribute to a range of postgraduate modules on various programmes delivered by the School of Arts, Languages, and Cultures. An indicative list of modules I teach:

Year 1

HIST10101: History in Practice

HIST10302: Forging a New World: Europe c. 1450-1750

Year 2

HIST121182: Back to the Future: The Uses and Abuses of History

Year 3

HIST32242: Cultural Entanglements: Life & Death in Colonial America

HIST30970: History Dissertation

Postgraduate  

HIST65182: Gender, Sexuality & the Body

SALC61082: Critical Ecologies