Puritans in the 21st Century: Politics, Myths, and the Future: A Symposium in Honor of Francis J. Bremer

This is a hybrid symposium hosted by American Ancestors at 97 Newbury Street, Boston, MA. Register here.

Presented in partnership with: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Congregational Library and Archives, First Church of Boston, Massachusetts Historical Society, and Partnership of Historic Bostons.

Puritans in the 21st Century, a day-long symposium on Saturday, November 7, 2026, hosted by six of New England’s leading historical institutions, makes the case for 17th century Puritans. Do they still matter today? A stellar collection of Puritan and other scholars argues they do—that now, in the 21st century, understanding the Puritans and their legacy is more important than ever.

Held in honor of the historian Francis J. Bremer and open to public, this symposium asks what 17th-century Puritan history in England and New England tells us about today’s politics and our understanding of religion and society. From Christian nationalism and the politics of slavery, from the 17th-century toleration debate to pushing Puritan boundaries, Puritans in the 21st Century brings together insights and new research of award-winning academics and public historians. This is the first major gathering of Puritan scholars in more than two decades at a time when early American studies are changing dramatically. Together they ask: What is the future of Puritan studies? Why and how are Puritans important today?

See the full symposium schedule here.

Speakers

Francis J. Bremer is professor emeritus at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. He has held visiting positions at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. He is an elected member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and the American Antiquarian Society and served on the board of the Congregational Library & Archives. He is the author or editor of over 20 books and numerous articles dealing with the Puritans in the 17th century Atlantic world, including John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father; Puritanism: A Short Introduction; Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds; Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism; and One Small Candle: The Story of the Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England.

Lori Rogers-Stokes is an independent scholar, public historian, and contributing editor for New England’s Hidden Histories, a digital history project on colonial-era Congregational church records. She is the author of two books on the Puritans: Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638-49: Heroic Souls (2020), and Gathered into a Church: Indigenous-English Congregationalism in Woodland New England (2025). Lori studies the history of Woodland New England, when Indigenous and English people took actions that continue to shape our lives today.

Daniel K. Richter is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History Emeritus and Director Emeritus of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Puritanism (2005) and the author of Native Americans and Pennsylvania (revised and expanded edition, 2026); Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (2013); Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (2011); Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (2001); and The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (1992).

Adrian Chastain Weimer is Professor of History at Providence College. She recently published a co-edited volume with David Hall, The Writings of Daniel Gookin and Allied Documents (2026). Her latest monograph, A Constitutional Culture: New England and the Struggle Against Arbitrary Rule in the Restoration Empire, was awarded the Winthrop Prize. A 2025 Longterm Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library allowed her to launch a new project on Anglo-Indigenous diplomacy between the Mohawk and Kennebec Rivers, 1650-1690.

John Coffey taught for 25 years at the University of Leicester in the UK. As of August 2026, he takes up a post at the University of Texas at Austin. He works on religion, politics, and ideas in the Protestant Atlantic world between 1600 and 1850. Coffey is the author of four monographs: intellectual biographies of the Scottish Covenanter Samuel Rutherford and the English Puritan John Goodwin; Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689; and Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr. He has edited or co-edited other works, including The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions: The Post-Reformation, and Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion. He was part of the editorial team that produced the prize-winning five-volume edition of Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae, and is currently leading a team working on another Oxford University Press edition, the million-word Diaries and Journals of William Wilberforce (in preparation).

Abram Van Engen is Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Sympathetic Puritans (2015) and City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (2020), which won the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Award and the Pelikan Award. He has also co-edited A History of American Puritan Literature (2020). His most recent book is Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church (2024), which was named the best book of 2024 in culture, poetry, and the arts from Christianity Today. His research and writing have appeared in multiple magazines and journals, and his work teaching poetry has expanded into an award-winning podcast called Poetry For All.

After earning his PhD in American Studies at Yale, David D. Hall taught there until 1970, when he moved to Boston University to serve as the initial chair of a new doctoral program, American and New England Studies. In 1989, he moved to Harvard Divinity School. The religious history of early modern Britain and New England have been central to his work, although he also became engaged in the emerging field of book history that led to the founding of a center for book history at the American Antiquarian Society and a five-volume history of the book in America, of which he was general editor. David Hall is author of the groundbreaking books Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England (1989); A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (2012); and the magisterial The Puritans: A Transatlantic History (2019).

Holly Brewer is Burke Professor of American History and Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. She is a specialist in the early British empire in the Americas as well as early modern debates about justice. Her first book traced the origin and impact of “democratical” ideas across the empire by examining debates about consent in theory and legal practice. By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (2005) won three prizes. Her upcoming book, The Kings’ Slaves: The British Empire and the Origins of American Slavery (2027) is based on 20 years of research about the connections between religious and ideological debates over power and their impact on legal practice in the 17th and 18th centuries. A winner of multiple awards, Holly Brewer is also a writer of amicus briefs for the Supreme Court and the project director and lead editor of the website slaverylawpower.org.

Neal Dugre is Associate Professor of Early American History and Chair of the Department of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. His current book project, titled Confederate New England: The Political Anatomy of an Early American Region, explores the relationship between confederal politics and Puritan colonialism in the 17th century northeast. Fellowships from the American Historical Association, Massachusetts Historical Society, New Netherland Institute, and other organizations have facilitated this research. Neal’s 2018 New England Quarterly article, “Repairing the Breach: Puritan Expansion, Commonwealth Formation, and the Origins of the United Colonies of New England, 1630–1643,” received the Walter Muir Whitehill Prize in Early American History.

Meredith Neuman teaches and researches in the fields of early American literature and book history. Her research centers around archival print and manuscript sources—ranging from notebooks kept by Puritans when they were listening to sermons, to amateur manuscript poetry, to readers’ marks in print books, to the history and context of the Mather family’s vast personal library. She is associate professor in the English department at Clark University, where she holds hands-on workshops with materials at the American Antiquarian Society; campus special collections are a common feature of her seminars. Her first book, Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (2013), explores the world of sermon notetaking, shifting attention from pulpit to pew, demonstrating how sermon auditors helped shape this dominant genre of Puritan literature. In her current book project, she endeavors to get to the bottom of that persistent question, “What’s the Matter with Early American Poetry?”