BA (Hons.), MSc, PhD, FRHistS
Dr Michelle Pfeffer is a historian of science, religion, and intellectual culture in the early modern period. She studied history in Australia before moving to Oxford for an MSc in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, for which she was awarded the Charles Webster Prize.
After finishing her PhD at The University of Queensland, she took up a Prize Fellowship in Early Modern History at Magdalen College, where I was later a Calleva Postdoctoral Researcher. She won the 2026 Singer Prize from The British Society for the History of Science and was recently elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Michelle joined Oriel as a Career Development Fellow in 2026.
As a historian of early modern science and society, Michelle is interested in how academic scholarship fares in the public sphere. Her first book, Inventing Immortality: Heterodoxy and Histories of the Soul in Early Enlightenment England, traces radical thinkers who thought ancient pagans invented the soul.
The book argues that the early Enlightenment was shaped as much by the circulation and transformation of knowledge as by new ideas. In the same vein, her latest Historical Journal article follows how ‘sleepy’ eighteenth-century scholarship could become a public sensation.
Michelle’s next project is a new history of public engagement with research that uses archives of early modern public disputations—hugely popular debates, open even to women—to rethink stereotypes about the ivory tower.
Much of Michelle’s current research centres on the history of astrology, and in particular its changing academic status. In a series of articles she has explored how a discipline once integral to philosophy, astronomy, and medicine was marginalised in early modern universities while flourishing in popular culture.
This is the subject of her current project, a trade book entitled RETROGRADE: Power, prediction, and the fate of a science (for more info, contact her agent at Peters Fraser + Dunlop). These interests feed into her collaborative ‘How Sciences End’ project, co-run with Alex Aylward (Oxford) and Joe Martin (Durham).
More broadly, Michelle works on the history of divination and forecasting from the ancient world to the present. With the anthropologist David Zeitlyn, she co-edited Divination, Oracles, & Omens (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024), which accompanied their Bodleian Library exhibition ‘Oracles, Omens & Answers’ (Dec 2024-Apr 2025). With Zeitlyn she now leads the TORCH Network, ‘Divination, Oracles, and Omens’. She has written about the role of astrology in the history of epidemiology for Past and Present and in 2023 curated her first exhibition, ‘Plague! at Magdalen: Epidemics and Public Life’.
In 2021, she co-organised a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and later wrote an article with Jan Machielsen on the book’s legacy, also for Past and Present. With Simon Dolet, she is organising the conference Forecasting the Weather, Between Divination and Science, from 8-9 October in Oxford’s Schwarzman Centre.
Michelle writes regularly for History Today and The Conversation and is one of the authors of A History of Astrology, Divination & Prophecy, published by DK of Penguin Random House. She enjoys contributing to radio and podcasts and gives a number of public lectures every year.
Inventing Immortality: Heterodoxy and Histories of the Soul in Early Enlightenment England (Oxford University Press, 2026).
A History of Astrology, Divination, and Prophecy, with Nick Campion et al., (DK, 2025).
Divination, Oracles, and Omens, co-edited with David Zeitlyn (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2024).
‘Divine Legation (1738–41), Public Sensation: William Warburton and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Scholarly Celebrity’, The Historical Journal, online First View.
‘Astrology, Plague, and Prognostication in Early Modern England: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Public Health’, Past & Present 263 (2024): 81-124.
‘Reassessing the Marginalization of Astrology in the Early Modern World’, The Historical Journal 66 (5) (2023): 1152-1176.
‘A Work Out of Time: Religion and the Decline of Magic at 50’, with Jan Machielsen, Past & Present 261 (2023): 259-96.
‘The Society of Astrologers (c. 1647–1684): Sermons, Feasts, and the Resuscitation of Astrology in Seventeenth-Century London’, The British Journal for the History of Science 54(2) (2021): 133-153.