The Reverend Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch is Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College and Campion Hall: a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society and of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He has written extensively on Tudor England; his biography on Thomas Cranmer won the 1996 Whitbread Biography, Duff Cooper and James Tait Black Prizes. His Reformation: Europe’s House Divided won the 2004 Wolfson History Prize, the 2004 British Academy Prize and the 2005 Non-Fiction Award of the National Book Critics Circle of America. His A History of Christianity: the first three thousand years won the 2010 Hessell-Tiltman Prize and the 2010 Cundill History Prize, the world’s largest history book prize. This was followed by the BBC series A History of Christianity (given the Radio Times Readers’ Award in 2010). His three-part TV series for BBC 2, How God made the English, was aired in 2012; and his BBC 2 series, Sex and the
Church, was televised in 2015 and will be the topic of a forthcoming book.

He is passionate about the need for academic disciplines in the humanities to communicate their value and their discussions to the widest possible public audience. His work in seeking to bring understanding of the problems, and opportunities, of religious belief was recognised by the award of the D. Leopold Lucus Prize for 2019 by the University of Tubingen: a fellow prize winner is the Dalai Lama. His contribution to scholarship was
specified in the citation for his knighthood in 2012.

Alongside his extraordinary academic brilliance is his deep humanity which champions those who are often rejected and silenced by institutions such as the Church. It is an honour that a man of such learning, exceptional gifts and great courage is one of the first Honorary Fellows of the Centre for Marian Studies.