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Paul Pinckney

Field Specialties

Tudor-Stuart England; English Revolution of 1640-1660; Comparative Revolutions; Puritanism

Dr. Paul Pinckney is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Davidson College who received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before coming to the University of Tennessee in 1969 to teach courses in Tudor-Stuart England and to try to improve the image of the Western Civilization course on campus. He has taught enthusiastically and successfully at all levels--survey, upper division, and graduate--and has won three major teaching awards, at UNC in 1967 and at Tennessee in 1977 and 1989.

Pinckney takes service to the department, college, and university very seriously. He is a long-term member of the Undergraduate Council, where he chaired committees to push through B plus and C plus grades and Academic Second Opportunity for undergraduates. He was departmental Honors Coordinator from 1981 to 1991 and has taught most of the honors courses in the department the last ten years. Pinckney has been the mentor for thirteen College Scholars. He started the History of London Summer Program in England in 1977 and the Semester in Wales Program in 1988. He chaired the Faculty Senate Student Affairs Committee from 1987 to 1990. He has been very active in the local Phi Beta Kappa chapter, serving as President in 1987-1988 and as on-going Historian. He has served on around thirty M.A. committees and around forty doctoral committees. He received an Outstanding Adviser Award at the Chancellor's Honors Banquet in April 1995 and the Chancellor's Citation for Distinguished Service to the University in 1997. He is very proud to be a Chorister and Lay Reader at St. John's Cathedral. Hundreds of Pinckney's former students and advisees have recently established an undergraduate history scholarship in his name.

In the last part of his career, Pinckney has returned to his first love, research and writing. He did pioneering work in the field of provincial politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate with his "The Cheshire Election of 1656," published in 1967 as both an article and a forty page booklet. This was widely used in British universities for many years and helped Pinckney win the friendship of many scholars in England, including Christopher Hill, Austin Woolrych, Gemld Aylmer, John Morrill, and Blair Worden. A parallel study on Suffolk appeared in 1984. He has written but not published other studies of Herefordshire, Wales, Leeds, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. He is working now on a conference paper entitled "Army and Gentry in Cromwellian Hertfordshire," which will be delivered at the Southern Conference on British Studies conference in November 2000. He has also published work related to Scotland, Bradshaw, and the Cromwellian parliaments. He is currently trying to condense an overly long book manuscript, Cromwellian Politics and the Major-Generals--The Army and the Gentry in the Md-1650s, and he is also working on biographies of John Archer, William Gregory, and other mid-17th-century English lawyers which will form parts of his third book, Provincial Lawyers and the Puritan Revolution.

Dr. Pickney has received Fulbright, Folger Library, and ACLS fellowships. He was President of the Southern Conference on British Studies in 1992 and 1993. His most recent doctoral student, John Shedd, is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York at Cortland.

Education

  • M.A. and Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, 1959 and 1962

Selected Publications

  • "The Suffolk Elections to the Protectorate Parliaments," Politics and People in Revolutionary England: Essays in Honour of Ivan Roots, ed. Colin Jones, Malyn Newitt, and Stephen Roberts (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 205-224.

  • "The Scottish Representation in the Cromwellian Parliament of 1656," Scottish Historical Review XLVI (1967): 95-114.

  • "Bradshaw and Cromwell in 1656," Huntington Library Quarterly XXX (1967): 233-240.

  • "The Cheshire Election of 1656," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library XLIX (1967): 387-426.
Paul Pinckney

Contact Information

Paul Pinckney
Associate Professor of History
915 Volunteer Boulevard
6th Floor, Dunford Hall
Knoxville, TN 37996-4065

Office: (865) 974-7078
Fax: (865)974-3915
E-mail: pinckney@utk.edu