Professor Emeritus Roger Richardson

Biography

Professor Roger Richardson is a graduate of Leicester and Manchester Universities and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He served as Head of the History Department at Winchester from 1977 to 1998. Following that he was Director of Research and Head of the Graduate Centre for three years (1998-2001) and latterly was Director of International Relations (2001-2011). In these various capacities he developed close links with American universities and held seven visiting professorships in that country in the course of his career. He held a Fellowship at the Huntington Library, California in 2006 and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Southern Oregon University in 2015. He has written book reviews for a number of leading American academic journals.

He has served as General Editor of two highly successful series of books for Manchester University Press. He co-founded the interdisciplinary journal Literature & History in 1975 and for thirty-four years was one of its co-editors.

Since 2022 he has been President of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, which recently celebrated its 175th anniversary. He continues to research, write and publish in his main fields of interest, seventeenth-century English history and Historiography.

Areas of expertise

• Seventeenth-century English history
• English local and comparative local history
• Historiography and philosophy of history

Publications

He is the author of a large number books, including:

• Puritanism in North-West England (1972, 2nd 50th anniversary commemorative edition, 2022)
• Debate on the English Revolution (1977, 3rd ed., 1998)
• Images of OIiver Cromwell (1993, reprinted 2018)
• The Changing Face of English Local History (2000, reprinted 2019)
• Household Servants in Early Modern England (2010). 

Three volumes of his collected essays – containing thirty six chapters - were published in 2011 and 2021.

In 2022 he was commissioned to bring out a new edition, with a historiographical introduction, of the long out-of-print classic by G.H. Tupling, The Economic History of Rossendale (1927).

In the course of his long career he also published over 500 book reviews in academic journals such as The Economic History Review, History, Literature & History, Northern History, Social History, Southern History and the Times Higher.