Dr. Jonathan Reimer is the John H. Van Gorden Assistant Professor of History.  He is an early modern historian who is especially fascinated by the web of religious, political, and social changes that we call the English Reformation(s).  His work examines the printers, preachers, and politicians who radically transformed British religion and culture in the wake of Henry VIII’s famous break with Rome.  His publications combine history, theology, and bibliography and can be found in journals such as Reformation, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Church History, Augustiniana, The Journal of World History, The Library, Notes & Queries, and Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society.  He is presently completing his first book on the life and writing of the Tudor clergyman and bestselling devotional author Thomas Becon (1512-1567), which will be published by Princeton University Press.  He is also researching a second book on the phenomenon of religious recantation in Reformation Britain and co-authoring a third book entitled The Spiritual Discipline of History.  He is also committed to writing for audiences beyond the academy in publications like First Things and Tui Motu InterIslands. 

Before joining the faculty at Eastern University, he taught at St Mark’s and Corpus Christi College in Vancouver, Canada, and at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge, England.  He was also a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Society for Renaissance Studies.  He is privileged to live with his fiercely intelligent and inexhaustibly interesting wife Thea (herself a theologian and a scholar) and their imperious, yet loveable, cat Mollie.