Rate My Professor Tim Cooper

Professor Tim Cooper serves as Professor of Church History and the inaugural Dean of Learning and Teaching at the University of Otago. He earned his BA (Hons) and PhD from the University of Canterbury. His research specializations center on seventeenth-century English religious history, including the Puritans, Richard Baxter, John Owen, Antinomians, Congregationalists, Separatists, and Calvinism within the Puritan tradition. Currently, he is co-editing a volume of Richard Baxter's correspondence from 1659 and 1660 with Tom Charlton for Oxford University Press, comprising approximately 500,000 words. Cooper teaches papers on the global history of Christianity, such as CHTH 102: The History of Christianity, and has developed innovative blended-learning models for the Theology Programme.

In his career at Otago, Cooper previously held positions as the first Head of the School of Arts, where he fostered staff development and advanced Māori and Pacific strategic frameworks, and as Associate Dean (Academic) in the Division of Humanities. His commitment to teaching excellence has earned him the University of Otago Teaching Excellence Award in 2014, the Ako Aotearoa National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award for Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching in 2021, and the Distance Education Association of New Zealand Merit Award in 2012. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). Key publications include John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (Ashgate, 2011), Fear and Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: Richard Baxter and Antinomianism (Ashgate, 2001), and co-editor of Richard Baxter: Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (Oxford University Press, 2020). Notable articles feature 'Elizabethan Separatists, Puritan Conformists and the Bible' in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2020) and 'Congregationalists' in The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I (2020). He delivered his Inaugural Professorial Lecture in 2022 and is a member of Dunedin City Baptist Church.