Alastair Hamilton


Alastair Andrew Hamish Hamilton FBA is an English historian.

Education

The only son of the publisher Hamish Hamilton and his second wife Yvonne Vicino Pallavicino, Hamilton was educated at Eton College and read Modern Languages at King’s College, Cambridge, proceeding MA in 1967. He received his PhD in Divinity in 1982.

Career

After working for the International Cultural Centre in Tunis and as a publisher and translator in New York City and Berlin, he was appointed to lecture in English literature at the University of Urbino in Italy in 1977. Having specialised in the study of the Radical Reformation and Western relations with the Arab world, he became the Dr C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute Professor of the History of Ideas at the University of Leiden in Holland in 1985, and in 1987 Professor of the History of the Radical Reformation at the University of Amsterdam. In 2003 he was awarded an S.T. Lee Fellowship and in 2004 was appointed the Arcadian Visiting Research Professor at the School of Advanced Study, London University, attached to the Warburg Institute. In 2004 he was elected a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and has been a full fellow since 2013, when he settled in London. In 2016 he held the chair of Coptic studies at the American University in Cairo, and in 2017 he was appointed a senior research fellow at the Warburg Institute.

Principal publications