Courtney MacPhee

Courtney MacPhee is a current PhD candidate in History and Stanford Vice Provost of Graduate Education Dissertation Fellow at Stanford University where she studies British history from the 15th century to the present under the guidance of David Como. Her research focuses primarily on religious and political history of the English Revolution in the Atlantic world, particularly ideas of apocalypticism, religious toleration, Caribbean colonial politics, and early British imperial ideologies. 

Her dissertation, "Imperial Apocalypse: Religious Radicals and the Making of England's Revolutionary Empire," has drawn together materials from over 30 archives across Europe, the United Kingdom, and the Americas to tell the story of the imperial activities of religious nonconformists during the English Revolution and their influence on political participation, religious liberty, and warfare across the British empire. The project reveals a crucial chapter in the history of the British empire and highlights how religious dissent reshaped ideas of political participation, liberty, and authority during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution.

You can find her most recent work, "Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, and Sectarian Exegesis: Imagined Apocalypses," published in 2026 at the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, DOI: 10.1017/S0022046925102480.

Her work has been funded by institutions such as the American Society of Church History, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the North American Conference of British Studies and its Pacific Coast regional branch, the Cromwell Association, and the Sixteenth Century Society.  

Prior to her time at Stanford, she received an MA in History and Museum Studies from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA.