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.
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