Jeffrey Collins in a historian of ideas, with a focus on early modern political thought. He is the author of two books — The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005) and In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience(Cambridge, 2020) — as well as many articles and book chapters on subjects such as religious war, toleration, atheism, church and state. Collins is a regular contributor of reviews to both the Times Literary Supplement and the Wall Street Journal.
Collins is currently writing an intellectual history of the Eikon Basilike, the sensationally influential book purportedly written by King Charles I before his execution after the English civil wars. The study will investigate the profound influence of the Eikon, and the vicious public controversy over its authorship.
“The Popish Plot: A Case Study in the Political History of Fear,” Journal of Modern History 95 (2023), 1-37.
“Early Modern England,” The Cambridge History of Atheism, ed. Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse. (2 vols., Cambridge, 2021), 1:202-222.
“Eikon Basilike in Context: The Intellectual History of a Martyrdom,” Revolutionising Politics: Culture and Conflict in England, 1620-60, eds. Paul Halliday, Eleanor Hubbard, and Scott Sowerby. (Manchester, 2021), 95-120.
“Thomas Hobbes’s Christian Commonwealth,” A Companion to Hobbes, ed. Marcus Adams. Blackwell-Wiley. (Hoboken, NJ, 2021), 303-317.
Review essay on “Jonathan Marks, Let’s Be Reasonable a Conservative Case for Liberal Education,” Society 58 (2021), 254-259.
“The Lost Historiography of Liberalism,” Review of Politics 81 (2019), 673-688.
“All the Wars of Christendom: Hobbes’s account of religious conflict,” Hobbes on Politics and Religion, eds. Robin Douglass and Laurens con Apeldoorn. (Oxford University Press, 2017), 219-238.
“Thomas Hobbes: a bibliography,” Renaissance and Reformation subfield of Oxford Bibliographies. Editor in chief, Margaret King. (2017).
“Thomas Hobbes’s Ecclesiastical History,” Oxford Handbook of Thomas Hobbes, eds. A.P. Martinich and Kinch Hoekstra. (Oxford, 2015), 520-544.
“Malcolm’s Leviathan: Hobbes’s Thing,” Modern Intellectual History 12 (2015), 95-120.
“Thomas Hobbes, Father of Atheists,” Atheism and Deism Revalued: Heterodox Religious Identities in Britain, 1650-1800, eds. Wayne Hudson, Diego Lucci, Jeffrey Wigelsworth. (Ashgate, 2013), 25-44.
“Thomas Hobbes, Heresy, and the Theological Project of Leviathan,” Hobbes Studies (2013), 6-33.
“The Early Modern Foundations of Classic Liberalism,” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, ed. George Klosko. (Oxford, 2011), 258-281.
“Restoration Anti-Catholicism: A Prejudice in Motion,” England’s Wars of Religion Revisited, eds. Glenn Burgess and Charles Prior. (Ashgate, 2011), 281-306.
“Quentin Skinner’s Hobbes and the Neo-Republican Project,” Modern Intellectual History 5 (2009), 343-367.
“Redeeming the Enlightenment: New Histories of Religious Toleration,” Journal of Modern History 81 (2009), 607-636.
“Interpreting the Religion of Thomas Hobbes: an Exchange,” (With A.P. Martinich.) Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009), 165-180.
“Silencing Thomas Hobbes: the Presbyterians and Leviathan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg. (Cambridge, 2007), 478-499.
“Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649,” Historical Journal 45 (2002) 305-31.
“The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell,” History 87 (2002), 18-40.
“Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan: a Newly Discovered Letter to Thomas Hobbes,” Historical Journal 43 (2000), 217-231.
“The Restoration Bishops and the Royal Supremacy,” Church History 68 (1999), 549-580.
Six entries for the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2005).
