Dr William Mitchell

Will is a historical and political geographer who examines European state formation and political identity since the 17^th century. He uses archival and qualitative methods to uncover what medias and ideas contributed to feelings of belonging to what Benedict Anderson called ‘imagined communities’: nations, confessions, and ideologies.

Will holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, and did previous graduate studies at Leiden, the Sorbonne, and Oxford.

Will has taught in the Department since 2022, and now is the Academic Tutor for the first-year undergraduates. This role involves being the first years’ Academic Mentor, as well as running a series of lectures on academic skills (GY101), and teaching the classes for Introduction to Geography (GY100). He also organises the dissertation seminars for Msc Regional and Urban Planning (RUPS) and Msc Local Economic Development (LED). He supervises students on RUPS.

Selected publications

• ‘English Representations of Freedom in the Dutch Republic, 1670-1795’: Historical Journal (2023): 66: 5 971-989
• ‘Pierre Jurieu and the Creation of a Protestant Imagined Community in England, 1680-1705’: European History Quarterly (2023): 53:4 579-598
• ‘Huguenot Contributions to English Pan-Protestantism’: Journal of Early Modern History (2021): 25:4 300-318
• ‘The Primitive Church Revived: The Apostolic Age in the Propaganda of William III’: Church History & Religious Culture (2021): 101:1 61-79

Awards

• Summer School Teaching Award 2025
• Class Teacher of the Year 2025
• Class Teacher of the Year 2024
• Class Teacher of the Year 2023

Will is engaged in several research projects in the areas of political economy and the politics of place. His main research focus is on the relationship between state development and nationalism over the long run. He analyses centuries-old documents to unpick how novel technologies like newspapers and infrastructures mediated peoples’ nationalised relationships with their state. For example, his PhD thesis analysed hundreds of popular documents produced in England during the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697) that used discourses of nationalism to justify the growth of the state.

His more recent work studies how popular medias in the long eighteenth century (1680-1820) facilitated affiliation to nation-states. Specifically, he is examining how travel guides – the most popularly consumed texts of the period – communicated political ideas that were posited as being fundamentally ‘British’ or ‘English’. His last paper investigated how British travel writing on the Netherlands produced ideas of British liberty that were contrasted with how freedom was communicated in the United Provinces.

• GY100
• GY101
• GY484/6