I grew up in Lincolnshire, and was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.  I have taught at Swansea since 1990, and was Head of the History Department from 2005 to 2008.  I currently head the College of Arts and Humanities.

Professor Spurr is a member of MEMO, Swansea’s Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research.

Current research

I work on three overlapping subjects: English history c.1640 to c.1700, the nature of religious belief and behaviour in early modern Britain, and how early modern people 'did things with words' (such as swearing, cursing, being polite, profane, blasphemous and witty). 

If all goes according to plan my next book will be A History of Oaths and Swearing.  I am also working on wit in the seventeenth century and editing some of John Locke’s most minor pieces for the Clarendon edition of his works.

Principal publications

Books

• (ed.), Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury (Ashgate, 2011)
• (ed.), The Entring Book of Roger Morrice,1677–1691. Volume 2: The Reign of Charles II, 1677-1685 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press in association with The Parliamentary History Record Society, 2007)
• The Post-Reformation: Religion, Society, Politics and Britain, 1603–1714 (London: Longman, 2006)
• England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’  (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)  
• English Puritanism, 1603–1689  (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998)
• The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991)

Book-chapters and journal articles

• 'The manner of English blasphemy 1676-2008’ in a forthcoming festschrift
• ‘The Lay Church of England’, in Grant Tapsell (ed), The Later Stuart Church of England 1660-1714 (Manchester University Press, 2012)
• The Poet’s Religion’ in Steven Zwicker and Derek Hirst (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 158-73
• ‘Later Stuart Puritanism’ in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. J. Coffey and P. Lim (Cambridge University Press,  2008)
• ‘“A Special Kindness for Dead Bishops”: The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 313–334
• ‘The Piety of John Dryden’, in S. N. Zwicker, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 237–258 
• ‘“The Strongest Bond of Conscience”: Oaths and the Limits of Tolerance in Early Modern England’, in H. Braun & E. Vallance, eds., Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 151–165
• ‘“A Sublime and Noble Service”: John Evelyn and the Church of England’, in M. Hunter & F. Harris, eds., John Evelyn and his Milieu (London: British Library, 2003), 145–163  
•  ‘A Profane History of Early Modern Oaths’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 11 (2001), 37–63

Recent conference papers and invited lectures

• ‘Wit, Religion and Liberty’, Civil and Religious Liberty in the Reign of Charles II, Yale University, July 2008
•  Keynote lecture, Anniversary of 1662 Conference, Exeter University, August 2012
• ‘ “Like Water Through a Sieve”: The Laity and Sermons in Post-reformation England’, The 66^th Friends of Dr Williams’s Library Lecture, London, to be delivered 18 October 2012
• ‘The Revolution of 1688’ The First Modern Revolution? The Glorious Revolution in Comparative Perspective, Sussex University, May 2010
  ‘The Politics of Style’, Civil and Religious Liberty in the Reign of Charles II, Yale University, July 2008

Principal research awards, fellowships, & prizes

•  Visiting Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, University of Cambridge, Lent Term 2006
• (with seven other members of the Morrice Editorial Board), Arts & Humanities Research Board grant, £167,000, for the publication of Roger Morrice’s Entring Book, 2002-2003