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Staff Profiles

Dr Simon Mills

Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History

  • Address: ARMB 1.23
    School of History, Classics, and Archaeology
    Newcastle University
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

I was awarded my Ph.D. at Queen Mary, University of London in 2009, and then held a series of research fellowships at the Council for British Research in the Levant, Amman; the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge; and the Dahlem Humanities Centre, Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2014 and 2017, I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Kent. I joined the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology as a Teaching Fellow in British and European History in September 2017, and was appointed Lecturer in Early Modern History in 2019, and Senior Lecturer in 2022. 

Research

Current Research

I am interested broadly in the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of Europe between around 1450 and 1800. My research examines the relationship between Europe and the Ottoman Empire; the histories of biblical and oriental studies; the history of philosophy; and 'intellectual geography'—that is, the attempt to understand how men and women in the past knew what they knew by tracing the circulation of books, manuscripts, or letters around the early modern world.

My first book A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600–1760 (Oxford University Press, 2020) tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Aleppo, Syria, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of early modern Aleppo, the book investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion and the emergence of new fields of English scholarship: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Graeco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize and the Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize 2022. A 'webinar' about the book, organised by the Council for British Research in the Levant, is available here, and a podcast for the New Books Network here.

Other interests include: 'sacred geography' in the eighteenth century; the study of Arabic in the early modern world; the intersections between commercial and intellectual life; the early history of Protestant missions in the Levant; and the teaching of philosophy in the eighteenth-century dissenting academies. In 2021, I held a David Walker Memorial Fellowship at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford; a short film about my research is available here. 

I am currently writing my second book about an Arabic-speaking Christian from Aleppo, who travelled through Europe in the early eighteenth century. I recently presented some of my findings in Berlin, at a conference on Oriental Manuscripts in Germany. During 2023/24, I shall be a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, and will hold a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to begin a new project on '"Oriental" poetry between the late Renaissance and the high Enlightenment'.   

Teaching


I am on leave for the academic year 2023/24, and for Semester 1 2024/25.

Publications