Staff Profiles

I was awarded my Ph.D. at Queen Mary, University of London in 2009, and then held a series of research fellowships at the Council for British Research in the Levant, Amman; the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge; and the Dahlem Humanities Centre, Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2014 and 2017, I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Kent. I joined the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology as a Teaching Fellow in British and European History in September 2017, and was appointed Lecturer in Early Modern History in 2019, and Senior Lecturer in 2022. 

Current Research

I am interested broadly in the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of Europe between around 1450 and 1800. My research examines the relationship between Europe and the Ottoman Empire; the histories of biblical and oriental studies; the history of philosophy; and 'intellectual geography'—that is, the attempt to understand how men and women in the past knew what they knew by tracing the circulation of books, manuscripts, or letters around the early modern world.

My first book A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600–1760 (Oxford University Press, 2020) tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Aleppo, Syria, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reconstructing the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of early modern Aleppo, the book investigates the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion and the emergence of new fields of English scholarship: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Graeco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize and the Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Book Prize 2022. A 'webinar' about the book, organised by the Council for British Research in the Levant, is available here, and a podcast for the New Books Network here.

Other interests include: 'sacred geography' in the eighteenth century; the study of Arabic in the early modern world; the intersections between commercial and intellectual life; the early history of Protestant missions in the Levant; and the teaching of philosophy in the eighteenth-century dissenting academies. In 2021, I held a David Walker Memorial Fellowship at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford; a short film about my research is available here. 

I am currently writing my second book about an Arabic-speaking Christian from Aleppo, who travelled through Europe in the early eighteenth century. I recently presented some of my findings in Berlin, at a conference on Oriental Manuscripts in Germany. During 2023/24, I shall be a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, and will hold a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to begin a new project on '"Oriental" poetry between the late Renaissance and the high Enlightenment'.   

I am on leave for the academic year 2023/24, and for Semester 1 2024/25.

• Articles

  • Mills S. Edward Pococke (1604-1691), Comparative Arabic-Hebrew Philology, and the Bible. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 2023, 53(1), 117-147.
  • Mills S. Jean Gagnier's De vita, et rebus gestis Mohammedis: Reading and Misreading the History of Islam in the Eighteenth Century. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2021, lxxxvi, 167-206.
  • Mills S. The English Chaplains at Aleppo: Exploration and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1620–1760. Bulletin for the Council for British Research in the Levant 2013, 60(1), 13–20.

• Authored Book

  • Mills S. A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600-1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

• Book Chapters

  • Mills S. Embassies, Trading Posts, Travelers and Missionaries. In: Sonja Brentjes, Peter Barker, and Rana Brentjes, ed. Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies: Practices from the 2nd/8th to the 13th/19th Centuries. London: Routledge, 2023, pp.773-786.
  • Mills S. Missionary Philologist: Johann Heinrich Callenberg between the Catholic and Protestant Orients. In: Markus Friedrich and Holger Zaunstöck, ed. Jesuit and Pietist Missions in the Eighteenth Century: Cross-Confessional Perspectives. Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle, 2022, pp.105-130.
  • Mills S. Johann Heinrich Callenberg's Orient. In: Zwierlein C, ed. The Power of the Dispersed: Early Modern Global Travelers beyond Integration. Leiden: Brill, 2022, pp.209-239.
  • Mills S, Steers D. The Dissenting Academies and the Scottish Universities. In: Isabel Rivers, ed. A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. In Preparation.
  • Mills S, Burden M. Metaphysics, Pneumatology, and Philosophy of Mind. In: Isabel Rivers, ed. A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. In Preparation.
  • Mills S, Merchán-Hamann C. The Huntington Collection. In: Rebecca Abrams and César Merchán-Hamann, ed. Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2020, pp.89-113.
  • Mills S. Reading Henry Maundrell’s Sacred Geography in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany. In: Whitehouse T; Keeble NH, ed. Textual Transformations: Purposing and Repurposing Books from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp.210-226.
  • Mills Simon. Scholarship. In: William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers, ed. The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History, c. 1550-1750. Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp.255-276.
  • Mills S. Learning Arabic in the Overseas Factories: The Case of the English. In: Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton, Charles Burnett, ed. The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2017, pp.272–93.
  • Mills Simon. Scripture and Heresy in the Biblical Studies of Nathaniel Lardner, Joseph Priestley, and Thomas Belsham. In: Michael Ledger-Lomas and Scott Mandelbrote, ed. Dissent and the Bible in Britain, 1650–1950. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp.85–112.
  • Mills Simon. The Chaplains to the English Levant Company: Exploration and Biblical Scholarship in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England. In: Judith Becker and Bettina Braun, ed. Die Begegnung mit Fremden und das Geschichtsbewusstsein. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012, pp.243–66.