Bruce Hindmarsh Appointed President of the American Society of Church History
The appointment began on January 1, 2012, and finishes on December 31, 2014, and includes one year as President-Elect and another year as Past-President. Dr. Hindmarsh’s responsibilities include planning the program for the 2013 annual meeting in New Orleans, chairing the council and executive committee, providing the presidential address to the society in 2014, and chairing the nominating committee in his final year.
“This is a great honour for Bruce and for Regent, not least because Bruce is the first non-American to be awarded the post widely seen as the highest academic honour for the discipline in North America,” says Paul Williams, Academic Dean of Regent College.
An alumnus of Regent College, Bruce Hindmarsh took his DPhil degree at Oxford University in 1993. From 1995 to 1997, he was also a research fellow at Christ Church, Oxford. He has since published and spoken widely to international audiences on the history of early British evangelicalism. His articles have appeared in respected academic journals such as Church History and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and he is the author of two major books of his own: John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1996) and The Evangelical Conversion Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2005). Dr. Hindmarsh has received numerous teaching awards, research grants, and fellowships. A recipient of multiple grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, he has also been a Mayers Research Fellow at the Huntington Library and a holder of the Henry Luce III Theological Fellowship. He gave the fifth annual Manchester Wesley Research Centre Lecture on art and religion in the eighteenth century in 2009, and has completed a project for the Huntington Library Quarterly on religious letter-writing in the same period. He is presently engaged in a book-length research project on early evangelical spirituality. An active lay member of the Anglican Church, he is married to Carolyn, and they have three children: Bethany, Matthew, and Sam.
About Regent College
Regent College is an evangelical, international graduate school of Christian studies based in Vancouver and affiliated with the University of British Columbia, Canada’s third largest university. It was founded in 1968 as the first graduate school of theology in North America to make education of the laity its central focus. Regent College is a place of academic rigour, cultural engagement, and vibrant faith that transforms intellect, imagination, and character. Here, people from around the world are inspired and enriched with a deep and practical Christian faith extending into all spheres of life and enabling them to live more thoughtfully in varied vocations in the church and the world.
About the American Society of Church History
An affiliate of the American Historical Association, the American Society of Church History (ASCH) was founded in 1888, for the purpose of scholarly study of the history of Christianity and its relationship to surrounding cultures in all periods, locations, and contexts. Through publications, conferences, awards, research support, and other means, the Society encourages the study of the Christian church and faith, its figures and movements, in institutional and non-institutional settings. It is the publisher of Church History, widely regarded as the journal of record in the field in America.
The society has some 1,900 members worldwide and its past presidents include Phillip Schaff (1888-93), Roland Bainton (1940), Kenneth Scott Latourette (1945), Jaroslav Pelikan (1965), Martin Marty (1971), Sydney Ahlstrom (1975), Bernard McGinn (1995), and Mark Noll (2005).