Defending the Faith: Global Histories of Apologetics and Politics in the Twentieth Century

Todd Weir, University of Groningen, Hugh McLeod, University of Birmingham

Todd H. Weir is Professor of History of Christianity and Modern Culture in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of the University of Groningen. Prior to arriving in the Netherlands, he taught at Queen's University Belfast for nine years. He is the author of Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge, 2014) which won Jacques Barzun Prize for Cultural History, and is currently completing its sequel: Socialism and Secularism in Germany 1890 to 1933: Two Cultures.

Hugh McLeod was Professor of Church History at the University of Birmingham 1994-2010 and was president of CIHEC, the international organisation of historians of Christianity 2005-10. He has held visiting posts at Amsterdam, Uppsala, Münster and Mainz, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Piety and Poverty: Working Class Religion in Berlin, London and New York, 1870-1914 (1996), Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848-1914 (2000), The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (2007). He edited the 20th century volume of The Cambridge History of Christianity (2006).