Congratulations to our own Dr Joshua Rushton, who has secured a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for the project “Catholic Renewal and Environmental Change in the Early Modern World”. He will take up his award in 2026 at the University of Manchester.

Josh’s project is the first to identify Catholic Renewal as a vital force of environmental change in the early modern period. Through close examination of religion as it was lived and experienced, his project argues for a co-constitutive relationship between Catholic Renewal and environments. The project rejects a unilateral anthropocentric framework and instead casts environments – springs, woodlands, volcanoes, and climatic conditions – as active agents in the reshaping of early modern religious life. The project will compel environmental humanities scholars to consider the valuable perspectives that early modern religious life offers for confronting our present ecological crisis by adopting a historical approach to the urgent question of the “sacralisation of nature”.

Many congratulations Josh!

Title Image: P.F Athanasio Nelli and F. Aurelio Cosimi Senese, Origine della Madonna della Quercia di Viterbo (Viterbo: Agostino Colaldi, 1571)

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