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Tim Cooper photoProfessor and Dean of Learning and Teaching
BA(Hons), PhD(Canterbury), FRHistS

Dean of Learning and Teaching
G.04 Scott/Shand
Tel +64 3 556 5581
Email tim.cooper@otago.ac.nz

Tim Cooper is Professor of Church History. He has published work on Richard Baxter and John Owen, on seventeenth-century English Antinomians, Congregationalists and Separatists, and on Calvinism within the Puritan tradition.

He teaches papers on the global history of Christianity. In 2014 he received a University of Otago Teaching Excellence Award and in 2021 he received a National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award.

He has abridged two of Richard Baxter's classic texts for a popular contemporary audience:
The Reformed Pastor and The Saint's Everlasting Rest.

Tim gave his Inaugural Professorial Lecture in November 2022:  
Watch the Inaugural Professorial Lecture

He is a member of Dunedin City Baptist Church and preaches regularly in the church.

Teaching

  • CHTH403 The Puritans: Working out the English Reformation

Preferred areas of supervision

  • Seventeenth-century English religious history
  • The Puritans
  • John Owen
  • Richard Baxter
  • The history of Christianity in New Zealand    

Main research interests

  • Richard Baxter
  • John Owen
  • The Puritans
  • Radical religion in seventeenth-century England
  • Intellectual history
  • Religious group identity

Current research

Tim is currently co-editing with Tom Charlton a volume of the correspondence of Richard Baxter to be published by Oxford University Press. This volume will include 130 letters: 87 of them in manuscript; 43 of them published, some of them very long. They were written either to or by Baxter in 1659 and 1660, a period in which his hopes and fortunes took a disastrous turn. Once completed, the volume will comprise somewhere in the order of 500,000 words

Publications

Keeble, N. H., Coffey, J., Cooper, T., & Charlton, T. (2020). Richard Baxter: Reliquiæ Baxterianæ: Or, Mr Richard Baxter's narrative of the most memorable passages of his life and times [5 vols] [Scholarly edition]. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 3044p.

Cooper, T. (2020). Elizabethan separatists, Puritan conformists and the Bible. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71(4), 778-797. doi: 10.1017/S0022046919002331

Cooper, T. (2020). Congregationalists. In J. Coffey (Ed.), The Oxford history of Protestant dissenting traditions (Vol. 1): The post-Reformation era, 1559-1689. (pp. 88-112). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198702238.003.0005

Cooper, T. (2011). John Owen, Richard Baxter and the formation of nonconformity. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 343p.

Cooper, T. (2001). Fear and polemic in seventeenth-century England: Richard Baxter and antinomianism. Hants, England: Ashgate, 238p.

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