Jeffrey Collins

Professor of Humanities (January 1, 2024)

Email: jeffrey.collins@ufl.edu

Jeffrey Collins will be Professor of Humanities in the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education starting on January 1, 2024. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Prior to joining he Hamilton Center he was a professor of history at Queen’s University, Canada. An intellectual historian, he has published numerous articles on early modern religion, politics, and political thought. His first book, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, was published by Oxford University Press in 2005; his second, In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020 and in 2021 was awarded the Morris D. Forkosh of the American Historical Association. He is currently working on two new book projects: an intellectual history (and book history) of Charles I’s purported “king’s book,” the Eikon Basilike, published immediately after his execution in 1649; and a volume for new Oxford History of Political Thought tentatively entitled “The Science of Sovereignty: Political Theory 1620-1710”.

For six years (2017-2023) Collins served as one of the editors of the Journal of British Studies, and he is currently on the editorial board of “Ideas and Practices, 1300-1850,” a book series in intellectual history published under the auspices of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, a life fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and is a member of the Royal Historical Society.

Collins has broad interests in the European and American history of religion and politics, rights, toleration, conscience, the state, constitutional history, liberalism, republicanism, and conservatism. He is a regular contributor to popular publications such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New Criterion, and the Wall Street Journal.