Professor Peter Gaunt
Professor
Biography
Peter Gaunt is Professor of Early Modern History, with teaching and research interests principally in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and European history. While the bulk of his working life has been spend as an academic, at the University of Chester and, before that, at the Victoria University of Wellington (as a post-doctoral fellow) and at the Universities of Wales and the of London (as a fixed-term lecturer), earlier in his career he also worked as an archaeologist and as an architectural historian specialising on the history of royal palaces and parks and elite buildings and as a freelance researcher-writing, specialising in preparing guidebooks for and exhibitions at historic buildings and heritage sites. In consequence, he has in the past also taught on the Archaeology programme offered by the University of Chester and includes some elements of landscape and architectural history in his History teaching. He also has significant editing experience, as the past editor of three academic/historical journals.
Teaching and Supervision
Professor Gaunt's teaching focuses in the main on the early modern period, delivering undergraduate modules on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and on seventeenth-century England/Britain and the English civil war. However, drawing on his background in both archaeology and as a landscape/architectural historian, he also offers or has offered undergraduate and postgraduate modules in those areas, including a broad survey of the physical development of Britain over the historic period and a more specialised Masters-level module on medieval castles.
Research and Knowledge Exchange
Professor Gaunt has a long, substantial and continuing record of research and publication, mainly in the fields of seventeenth-century England and Britain in general and of the 1640s and 1650s in particular. He is the author or editor of seventeen books, including two (different) biographies of Oliver Cromwell and studies of the civil war in Wales, in England and Wales and in Britain as a whole, as well as scores of articles, chapters and shorter pieces. He is currently working on new and expanded editions of The Stuart Age and of The English Civil War: A Military History, as well as studies of first person accounts of the English civil war and of the coming of the war to Cheshire. He is also involved in a new collaborative project to make available (online) primary sources relating to the civil war in Chester and Cheshire and, via both The Cromwell Association and The World Turned Upside Down project, he is expanding his role as a podcaster on diverse aspects of (the causes, course and consequences of) the English civil war.