Senior Research Fellow in Early Modern History
Sean Kelsey was awarded a scholarship to read history as an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and took his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1995. His doctoral dissertation was published under the title Inventing a republic: the political culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649 to 1653 (Manchester, UK, and Stanford, CA, 1997). As a post-doctoral fellow of the British Academy, Dr Kelsey studied the trial and execution of Charles I, the inauguration of the English Commonwealth, and the foundation of its principal executive agency, the Council of State. He has published a number of articles on these and related subjects in journals including the English Historical Review, the Historical Journal, the Journal of Legal History, and the Law and History Review. While he continues actively to pursue scholarly research on a widening range of topics, in 2007 Dr Kelsey was admitted to the roll as a solicitor of the supreme court of England and Wales (as it then was). Today, he works as a commercial litigator for the Government Legal Department.