Associate Professor in Social History
Director of Studies in Social and Local History
Director of the MSc in English Local History
Director of the Diploma in English Social and Local History
Jonathan Healey studied History at Magdalen College Oxford and Rural History at the University of Reading before completing his DPhil at Oxford in 2008.
He is a social historian of early modern England, and has worked in the department since 2012. He is a fellow of Kellogg College.
Jonathan’s interests are in early modern social and political history. His work has covered topics such as famine, poverty, landholding and the landscape, popular politics and the social history of the law.
He has also written two bestselling books about seventeenth century history. The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023) is a broad narrative of England’s social and political history from 1603 to 1689. It was chosen as a Book of the Year by Waterstones, the Daily Telegraph, the Economist and the New Yorker. The Blood in Winter: A Nation Descends, 1642 (2025) tells the story of the political crisis that brought England to the brink of civil war. It was a Book of the Year for The Times, History Today, and the Daily Telegraph.
He is currently writing his third narrative book on the seventeenth century, entitled The Righteous and the Wicked, it describes how the end of the first civil war failed to bring political settlement, and the turmoil that eventually led to the regicide and the abolition of the British monarchy.
https://bsky.app/profile/jonathanhealey.bsky.social
