Select Publications

Czechoslovakia book cover 

Books

  • Christianity behind the Iron Curtain, 1945-1989 (Yale University Press, forthcoming). This 150,000-word book, commissioned by Yale University Press, will offer the first major study of Christianity in the Eastern bloc to be published since the end of the Cold War.
  • Československo: Stát, který zklamal, by Mary Heimannová, tr. Z. Hron (Petrkov, 2020), xxviii + 403 pp.
  • Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed (Yale University Press, 2009; 2010; paperback edn 2011), xviii + 406 pp.
  • Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford University Press, 1995), viii + 253 h/b.

Articles, Chapters, Sections

  • ‘Evangelicals and the Communist Regimes in Postwar East-Central Europe’, The Gospel and Religious Freedom, ed. D. Bebbington (Baylor University Press, 2023).
  • ‘Saints and Devotional Cultures’, co-authored with Cara Delay, The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, vol. 5 (Oxford University Press, 2023).
  • ‘Victorian Piety and the Revival of Material Religion in Britain’ in Material Reform: The Impact of Reform and Modernity on Material Religion in North-West Europe, 1780-c.1920, eds. Jan De Maeyer and Peter Jan Margry (Leuven University Press, 2022).
  • ‘Czechoslovakia, Czech-Slovakia and the Munich Crisis’ in The Munich Crisis, Politics and the People, ed. J. Gottleib, D. Hucker and R. Toye (Manchester University Press, 2021).
  • ‘The Mindszenty Affair and the US Embassy in Budapest’, in Embassies in Crisis: Studies of Diplomatic Missions in Testing Situations, ed. R. Pastor-Castro and M. Thomas (Routledge, 2020).
  • ‘Catholicism behind the Iron Curtain: Czechoslovak and Hungarian responses to Humanae Vitae’ (with Gábor Szegedi), in Alana Harris, ed., The Schism of ’68: Catholicism, Contraception and Humanae Vitae in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
  • ‘Medical and Mystical Opinion in Modern English Catholicism: The Contentious Case of Teresa Higginson’, in Tine Van Oesslaer, ed., Sign or Symptom? Exceptional Corporeal Phenomena in Medicine and Religion (19th and 20th century) (KADOC, Leuven University Press, 2017).
  • ‘The Secularisation of St Francis of Assisi’, British Catholic History 33 (Cambridge University Press, May 2017).
  • ‘Mysticism in Bootle: Victorian Supernaturalism as An Historical Problem’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge University Press, April 2013).
  • ‘Christian Piety in Britain during the ‘Long’ Nineteenth Century, circa 1780-1920’, Piety and Modernity: The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Church, State and Society in Northern Europe, c. 1780-c.1920, ed. A. Jarlert (Leuven University Press, 2012).
  • ‘Czechoslovakia between the Wars’, History Review (December, 2010).
  • ‘The Scheming Apparatchik of the Prague Spring, Europe-Asia Studies (formerly Soviet Studies), 60, 10 (December 2008), 1717-1734. (Subsequently republished as a chapter in L. Cashman, ed., 1948 and 1968: Dramatic Milestones in Czech and Slovak History (Routledge, 2009). Reissued as a paperback in 2013).
  • ‘Catholic Revivalism in Worship and Devotion’ (worldwide) in S. Gilley and B. Stanley, eds., The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 8 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 70-83.
  • ‘English Catholic Particularism in Piety and Politics’, in The Black International/L’Internationale noire, ed. E. Lamberts (Leuven University Press, 2002), 447-463.
  • ‘Christianity in Western Europe from the Enlightenment’ in A World History of Christianity, ed. A. Hastings (Cassell Group, 1999; paperback edn. 1999), 458-507. Republished as a chapter in Noel Davies and Martin Conway, eds., World Christianity in the 20th Century: SCM Reader (2008). A Chinese version was published in 2011.
  • ‘Devotional Stereotypes in English Catholicism’ in F. Tallett and N. Atkin eds., Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789 (Hambledon Press, 1996).

Biographical Articles

  • ‘Herbert Thurston (1856-1939), Jesuit Scholar’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
  • ‘Teresa Higginson (1844-1905)’, alleged mystic, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
  • ‘Mary Ann Girling (1827-1886)’, stigmatic and founder of religious cult, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
  • ‘Sir William Bovill (1796-1841)’, judge in the Tichborne case, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
  • ‘John Le Brun (d. 1865)’, missionary in Madagascar, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
  • ‘David Jones (1796-1841)’, missionary in Madagascar, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
  • ‘Charles Aylmer (1786-1847)’, Jesuit, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Book Reviews

  • ‘Cold War Mary: Ideologies, Politics, Marian Devotional Culture’, English Historical Review (2022).
  • ‘How the Vatican became a World Player’, Diplomatic History (2021).
  • ‘Velvet Revolutions: An Oral History of Czech Society’, English Historical Review 133 (2018), 344-6.
  • ‘Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands’, Central Europe (2018).
  • ‘The Czecho-Slovak Struggle for Independence, 1914-1920’, Austrian History Yearbook 48 (2017), 317-9.
  • ‘Ageing, Ritual and Social Change: Comparing the Secular and Religious in Eastern and Western Europe’, Social History 40 (2015), 273-5.
  • ‘Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia’, English Historical Review 130 (2015), 243-5.
  • ‘Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989-1992’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire 49 (2014).
  • ‘The Pious Sex: Catholic Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity in Belgium, circa 1800-1940’, The Innes Review 65 (2014), 182-4.
  • ‘Czechs, Slovaks and the Jews, 1938-48: Beyond Idealisation and Condemnation’, History 99 (2014), 724-6.
  • ‘Devotional Cultures of European Christianity, 1790-1960’, The Catholic Historical Review (2013), 96-7.
  • ‘English Catholics and the Education of the Poor’, Victorian Studies 55 (2013), 514-6.
  • ‘British Romanticism and the Catholic Question’, Recusant History 31 (2012), 115-16.
  • ‘After Hitler, Before Stalin: Catholics, Communists and Democrats in Slovakia’, English Historical Review 127 (2012), 772-3.
  • ‘The Greengrocer and his TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring’, English Historical Review 126 (2011), 1026-7.
  • ‘The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe’, Oral History 39 (2011), 122-3.
  • ‘Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 60 (2009), 866.
  • ‘Contested Identities: Catholic Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales’, English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1523-5.
  • ‘Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism’, Europe-Asia Studies 60 (2008), 1267-8.
  • ‘Irish Pilgrimage: Holy Wells and Popular Catholic Devotion’, English Historical Review.
  • ‘Who’s Who in Victorian England’, History.
  • ‘Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York; Religion and Society in England, 1850-1914’, Victorian Studies 40 (1997), 553-6.
  • ‘Elizabeth Prout, 1820-1864: A Religious Life for Industrial England’, History.