BIOGRAPHY

A scholar of early modern Europe and North America, Prof. Macfarlane works at the intersection of religious, cultural, and intellectual history. She has a particular interest in the history of biblical scholarship, encompassing its production by Latin-speaking scholarly elites, its interactions with vernacular religious culture, and its relationship with theological controversy and confessional identity.

These interests underwrite much of her research, including her first book on the Elizabethan Hebraist Hugh Broughton (Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy: The Polemical World of Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), published with Oxford University Press in 2021); her co-edited volume with Joanna Weinberg and Piet van Boxel on the early modern reception of the Mishnah (The Mishnaic Moment: Jewish Law among Jews and Christians in Early Modern Europe, published in 2022 in the Oxford-Warburg Series); and her second monograph on the relationship between erudition and piety in an exceptional community of early immigrants to New England (Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2024). 

She is currently working on her third monograph, on the study of Hebrew in North America circa 1660-1800.

Macfarlane most recently served as an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, where she also received her BA, MSt, and DPhil. She has previously held a Title A Research Fellowship (JRF) at Trinity College, Cambridge University and her research has also been supported by fellowships from the Houghton Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, KU Leuven, and Lund University.