Staff Profiles

I am a historian of early modern Britain. My work focuses on the history of religion and politics, with a particular focus on anti-Catholicism and religious ‘othering’. I am also interested in early modern networks, anti-Jacobitism, governance in the 1690s, and histories of religious exile.

I joined Newcastle in 2026, having worked previously at the universities of Stirling and Aberdeen. I received my doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 2021, where I also received my Masters degree, after completing my undergraduate studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford.

Roles and Responsibilities

 I am the book reviews editor for the Scottish Historical Review, and a council member of the Scottish History Society.

My research focuses on religion, politics and ideas in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with a particular focus on Scotland. My first book, Anti-Catholicism in Scotland, 1688–1750: Popery, Politics and Protestant Identities, explores the significant role opposition to ‘popery’ occupied in the reshaping of Scottish religious and political culture in the long eighteenth century. Arguing that the nature and trajectory of opposition to ‘popery’ in this period was influenced as much by the fragmentation of Scottish Protestantism as it was by the political threat of Jacobitism, my research questioned prevailing interpretations of the unifying properties of anti-Catholicism in the eighteenth century. In doing so, it provides a more complex picture of the role anti-Catholicism played in Protestant identity formation and recovers the importance of opposition to ‘popery’ in the development of Protestant pluralism.

I retain research interests in religion and government policy in the 1690s, a decade that remains surprisingly overlooked and underexplored, particularly in terms of how government worked after the revolution of 1688–90. From 2021 to 2023 I was a postdoctoral research fellow on the digital humanities Leverhulme-Trust project ‘The Scottish Privy Council, 1692–1708: Government from Revolution to Union’. I co-edited a digital edition of the council’s records in this period, https://spcr.ac.uk/. My research contribution concentrated on religion and politics, particularly the council’s relationship with the established Church and its interactions with religious minorities and dissidents.

My current research focuses on the interconnected themes of religious exile and correspondence networks. I am interested particularly in the underground epistolary network of James Carnegy (fl. 1697–1734), a Catholic priest and spy, and am developing new research on Huguenots in early modern Scotland.

HIS1100: Evidence and Argument

HIS1101: Historical Sources and Methods

HIS1102: History Lab I

HIS1105: What is History For?

HIS2319: Reformation and Revolution: Tudors to Georgians

HIS3000: Reading History - Felix Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

• Articles

  • Loughlin C. Divine Destruction: Edinburgh’s “Lesser Great Fire” of 1700. History Scotland 2023, 23(6), 24–28.
  • Loughlin C. The Church of Scotland and the “Increase of Popery”, c.1690–1714. Scottish Church History 2019, 48, 169–190.
  • Loughlin C. Concepts of Mission in Scottish Presbyterianism: the SSPCK, the Highlands, and Britain’s American Colonies, c.1709–40. The Church and Empire: Studies in Church History 2018, 54, 190–207.

• Authored Book

  • Loughlin C. Anti-Catholicism in Scotland, 1688–1750: Popery, Politics and Protestant Identities. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2026. In Press.

• Book Chapters

  • Loughlin C. Religious Minorities and the Privy Council of Scotland. In: Kennedy, A; MacDonald, A; Mann, A, ed. The Scottish Privy Council from Revolution to Union, 1689 to 1708. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2027. In Press.
  • Loughlin C. Peter Rae, Presbyterian History and the Religious Politics of Anti-Jacobitism in Early Eighteenth-Century Scotland. In: Cunningham, C; Filet, J; Runacre, B, ed. The Apex of Jacobitism: Challenges, Cultures, and Legacies of the 1715 Rising. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2027. In Press.

• Research Dataset/Database

  • Mann A, Kennedy A, MacDonald A, Doak L, Loughlin C. Scottish Privy Council Records, 1692–1708. 2024.