Keith Wrightson

Keith Wrightson's picture
Randolph W Townsend Jr Prof History
Address: 
320 York St, New Haven, CT 06511-3627
203-432-7248

Keith Wrightson, Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History, is a scholar of early modern British history.  He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 1974 and has taught at the Universities of St Andrews (1975-84), Cambridge (1984-99) and Yale (since 1999).  He is a Fellow of the British Academy (1996) and of the Royal Historical Society (1986),and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge (2008).

His publications include English Society, 1580-1680 (1982); Earthly Necessities. Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000); Poverty & Piety in  an English Village. Terling 1525-1700 (with David Levine, 1979); The Making of an Industrial Society. Whickham, 1560-1765 (with David Levine, 1991); Ralph Tailor’s Summer: a Scrivener, his City and the Plague (2011), and many essays on the social and cultural history of early modern England. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of several scholarly journals and recently edited A Social History of England, 1500-1750 (2017).

At Yale, he has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies and as Senior Essay Director for the Department of History and has chaired the Renaissance Studies Program. He serves on the advisory board of the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre (London) and has taught in the Yale-in-London program. In 2001, he was awarded the John Ben Snow Prize, presented by the North American Conference on British Studies, and in 2008, Yales’s Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities. 

Campus address: Jonathan Edwards College L11
Phone: (203) 432-7248
Email: keith.wrightson@yale.edu