Professor 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.
He has also published a book drawing lessons from the fractured relationship between Richard Baxter and John Owen: When Christians Disagree.
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
- CHTH 102 The History of Christianity
Preferred areas of supervision
- The Puritans
- John Owen
- Richard Baxter
Main research interests
- Richard Baxter
- John Owen
- The Puritans
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. Authored Book - Research
Cooper, T. (2020). Elizabethan separatists, Puritan conformists and the Bible. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71(4), 778-797. doi: 10.1017/S0022046919002331 Journal - Research Article
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 Chapter in Book - Research
Cooper, T. (2011). John Owen, Richard Baxter and the formation of nonconformity. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 343p. Authored Book - Research
Cooper, T. (2001). Fear and polemic in seventeenth-century England: Richard Baxter and antinomianism. Hants, England: Ashgate, 238p. Authored Book - Research