"I am very grateful to NTC and MWRC for the opportunities that I had during the past six months as a postdoctoral research fellow. Manchester was an exciting city to live in and the College’s student and faculty community was a warm and inviting place to be.
I enjoyed pursuing my research interests in the special collections of the John Rylands Library. While working there, Dr Peter Nockles directed me to a copy of John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament that Augustus Montague Toplady thoroughly annotated while he was a student at Trinity College, Dublin. These extensive annotations provide new insights into the public theological debates that Toplady had over ten years later with Wesley as well as those that occurred between Calvinists and Arminians within the eighteenth-century Church of England, more generally. I am currently working on a journal article manuscript based on this previously unstudied source.
Additionally, I believe that I have also grown professionally during my time at the MWRC. I had opportunities to work as a research assistant to Professor Howard Snyder and Dr Geordan Hammond, give several guest lectures, supervise a master’s degree student’s directed study, and perform academic administrative work for the College.
A special highlight for me was organising the summer Methodist Heritage Tour to Gloucester and Bristol. This was a great time shared with Ph.D. students and staff from the college, deepening friendships and learning more about the early Methodist movement by visiting significant historical sites."