My research focusses on the long-term impact of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations on German society and culture. The most distinctive element of my approach is the incorporation of visual evidence into the broader frameworks of religious history. My first monograph, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500-1648, drew on both textual and visual sources to analyse the significance of Marian piety during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. My second monograph, A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany, was published in 2017.  It explains how and why Lutheranism—a confession that insisted upon the pre-eminence of God’s Word—became a visually magnificent faith, a faith whose adherents produced, during the eighteenth century, monuments as splendid as the Frauenkirche in Dresden. I spent 2017-18 as a visiting fellow at the Freie Universität in Berlin in order to work on my next major project, which focuses on religious life during and after the Thirty Years' War.

See also the St Andrews Reformation Studies Institute

Faith and Survival: A Religious History of the Thirty Years War.