Polly Ha | Emory University School of Law | Atlanta, GA

Polly Ha, Associate Professor of Early Modern History at Duke University in the Divinity School and History Department. Her research focuses on institutional developments in the early modern period alongside the construction of diverse confessional traditions. Completing her BA in History at Yale and PhD at the University of Cambridge, her early work explored the historical method, ecclesiastical jurisprudence, and development of alternatives to the Church of England in the post-Reformation Anglophone world, including the evolution of competing church polities in the new world. She recently guest edited a Special Issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies which explored the diversification of Protestant orientations to sacred texts and traditions beyond the Latinate world. In addition to publishing over a dozen articles and chapters in leading journals and collections, she is chief editor of two major critical editions, “The Puritans on Independence” and “Reformed Government,” which shed new light on early modern notions of conciliarism, historical contingency, and institutional mutability in response to Richard Hooker’s “Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.” Her current work seeks to offer an alternative explanation for the expansion of liberty that challenges a series of myths behind the foundations of the Liberal West.