Dr John Gallagher

Profile

I am a historian of language, education, and mobility in the early modern period. I hold a BA in History and French from Trinity College Dublin, and and MPhil and PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. Before coming to Leeds in 2017, I was a Research Fellow in History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. My research has been funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust. I have held visiting positions or fellowships at KU Leuven and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille, and in 2024-25 I will hold a Maddock Research Fellowship at Marsh’s Library in Dublin. In 2023, I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History. 

My first book, Learning Languages in Early Modern England, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019 (paperback edition 2022). My articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the English Historical Review, Renaissance Quarterly, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Huntington Library Quarterly, Renaissance Studies, The Italianist, Early Modern French Studies, and elsewhere. With Dr Rachel Leow, I am Co-Editor of The Historical Journal. I am a member of the editorial board of the ‘Polyglot Encounters’ book series published by Brepols, and sit on the advisory board of History Today. 

I am a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and have made programmes for BBC 4 TV and BBC Radio 3, including Scuffles, Swagger and Shakespeare: The Hidden History of English on BBC 4, and my Radio 3 Sunday Feature, The History of the Tongue. I am a regular presenter on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking and on New Thinking podcasts for the BBC, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. I write for a variety of media outlets, including the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Irish Times, and the London Review of Books. 

Research interests

I am a social and cultural historian of the early modern period, with particular interests in language, migration, and education. I have researched and written on topics from the history of Italian grammar to the Grand Tour, from annotated books to migrants’ eating habits, and from perfumed gloves to Mediterranean piracy. I’m currently working on a histories of migration and multilingualism in early modern London. Using the rich records of the city’s migrant communities, this project uses sources predominantly in French, Dutch, Italian, and English to explore urban multilingualism and polyglot lives, offering new perspectives on identity, language, urban life, and migration in early modern England and beyond. A first article based on this research was published in 2024 – you can read it open access here. With Prof Natalia Filatkina (Universität Hamburg) I co-lead the project ‘MAPS: Multilingual Archives in Premodern Societies’. 

• Strangers: Migration and Multilingualism in Early Modern London

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• Member of Council, Society for Renaissance Studies
• Renaissance Society of America

Student education

I teach and supervise at all levels in the School of History. Research-led teaching is central to what I do: I work with my students on early modern sources and enjoy leading trips to archives and libraries where they can work with early modern source materials, or to early modern sites where students can get a real feel for the period. My teaching covers many different aspects of early modern history, touching on anything from the history of insult and offence to migration, mobility, and material culture. I love supervising student research, and enjoy working with students as they craft their BA dissertations or embark on postgraduate research. 

As well as teaching on topics in early modern history, I enjoy engaging students in debates over historical approaches and methodologies, from microhistory to histories of concepts and keywords. I’m also passionate about language-learning, and am always keen to support students who want to approach historical sources or scholarship in another language. I run an extracurricular study group for second- and third-year undergraduate students called Languages for Historians, which supports students in language-learning and multilingual research. 

Research groups and institutes

• Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Current postgraduate researchers

• Samuel Dodson
• Claire Turner
• Rosalyn Cousins
• Juliet Atkinson
• Chris Toole