Polly Ha

Dr. Ha’s work focuses on the intellectual and social history of the Reformation and post-Reformation. She uses reception studies, historical method and theology, political thought, and social history to explore the construction of diverse confessional and ecclesiastical traditions and their impact on men and women across the social order. Her forthcoming book The Future of Freedom (Yale University Press) expands the range of moral, political, and temporal conditions that early modern divines introduced for safeguarding the long-term future of freedom, including freedom of speech, association, consent, and conscience. She is currently exploring moral deliberation and cognitive liberty from historical, ecclesiastical, and legal perspectives.

She has published numerous articles on reformation reception, co-edited a volume with Patrick Collinson on The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Remapping British Protestant Thought in the Long Reformation (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern History, 2023). Her monograph English Presbyterianism, 1590-1640 (Stanford University Press, 2011) challenged traditional assumptions about pre-civil war England and the nature of popular participation in reformed communities, including English exiles in the Netherlands and New England. She is also chief editor of The Puritans on Independence (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Reformed Government (Oxford University Press, 2021), which documented clandestine debates over conciliarism, historical contingency, and institutional mutability in response to Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.