Rate My Professor Michael Edwards

Dr Michael Edwards is a historian of early modern Britain and Europe affiliated with the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge and serving as Gurnee Hart Fellow and College Associate Professor at Jesus College, Cambridge. He studied History at Cambridge, was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University from 2000 to 2001, and completed his MPhil and PhD at Cambridge. After a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ’s College from 2005 to 2009, he joined Jesus College as a Fellow in 2009, where he holds roles including Graduate Tutor, Keeper of the Old Library, and Director of Studies in History and related programmes. He is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of History and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

His research focuses on early modern intellectual and cultural history, the history of philosophy, and the history of political thought, with particular attention to how people, books, and ideas moved across the early modern world. Publications include the co-edited and translated edition of René Descartes’s Regulae ad directionem ingenii (Oxford University Press, 2023), Time and the Science of the Soul in Early Modern Philosophy (Brill, 2013), and articles on topics such as the lost library of Anne Conway, women’s book ownership, and the cultural and financial history of enslavement in the early modern Atlantic world. He has co-edited the journal Early Science and Medicine and held research fellowships at the University of Oklahoma and CRASSH.