Hugh McLeod

I am a historian specialising in the religious history of the 19th and 20th century. I recently retired from my Birmingham chair, but I am still very active in research and postgraduate supervision.
As a Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies at Uppsala, I was part of a group researching long-term patterns of religious change in the modern west – in particular, the differences and similarities between the religious trajectories of the US and Western Europe since the 1790s.
My latest book, Religion and the Rise of Sport in England (Oxford University Press, 2022), looks at the relationship between religion and sport as it went through phases of repulsion in the first half of the 19th century, growing attraction in the middle decades of the century, intimacy in the later 19th century, and gradual separation in the 20th century.
My earlier book, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (OUP, 2007), analyses a time of decisive religious change throughout the western world. In many countries there was a rapid decline in church-going, and at the same time the religious options widened dramatically. The book makes extensive use of oral history in order to show how the changes were experienced by “ordinary people”.