Dr Linda Kirk

Linda Kirk's undergraduate education was at Cambridge, and after a short while lecturing at the then University College of Rhodesia she returned to England, simultaneously starting part-time work on her doctorate at London University and teaching at Sheffield University, where she worked for 40 years.

Her main research interests lie in the history of seventeenth and eighteenth-century ideas and their connections with social and political behaviour in ancien régime Europe. Her book on Richard Cumberland and Natural Law (1987) went into a second edition in 2022.

She has written on the resurgence of religious intolerance in Europe in the late seventeenth century.

She has focused, however, on the city-state of Geneva, especially in the eighteenth century, publishing a number of articles.

In exploring the ways in which eighteenth-century understandings of political culture gave rise to what moderns perceive as states, participation-rights and revolutions she engages with both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and has published on Tom Paine.