Alastair Hamilton

Alastair Hamilton was born in Barnet on 20 May 1941. He was educated at Eton and King's College Cambridge, where he read Modern Languages and received his PhD in Divinity in 1982. In 1977 He was appointed to lecture in English literature at the University of Urbino in Italy. 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 (Anabaptistica) at the University of Amsterdam. In 2003 he was awarded an S.T. Lee Fellowship and in 2004 was appointed the Arcadian Visiting Research Professorship at the School of Advanced Study, London University, attached to the Warburg Institute. In 2016 he held the Chair of Coptic Studies at the American University in Cairo. In 2017 he was given a Senior Research Fellowship at the Warburg Institute, and in 2022 he became an Honorary Fellow.. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.