Michael Hunter
Professor Michael Hunter, Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck, is the world’s leading authority on Robert Boyle and a foremost historian of early modern science. His editions of Boyle’s Works, Correspondence, and Workdiaries transformed scholarship on the Royal Society and seventeenth-century intellectual culture. His acclaimed biography Boyle: Between God and Science (2009) reshaped our understanding of Boyle as a conflicted, questioning figure. More recently, in Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience (2023), Hunter examined the roots of unbelief long before the so-called “Age of Reason.” His wider research into science, magic, and religion highlights the currents of doubt, dissent, and freethought that underpin Britain’s humanist heritage. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007, he is recognised internationally for his contributions to the history of ideas.