Paul Chang-Ha Lim

Associate Professor of the History of Christianity, Divinity School
Associate Professor of Religious Studies; Associate Professor of History

Professor Lim is a historian of early modern England, focusing on religious and intellectual changes around and after the Civil War. He is Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University (Divinity School and College of Arts & Science), and is Faculty Head of Crawford House in The Commons, Vanderbilt's new campus and collaborative learning community of resident and affiliated faculty, first-year students, and staff professionals.

He has keen interest in connecting the post-Reformation history of England with the concurrent political, religious and intellectual developments on the Continent. Paul Lim’s book Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, August 2012). He is author of In Pursuit of Purity, Unity and Liberty: Richard Baxter’s Puritan Ecclesiology in Its Seventeenth-century Context (Brill, 2004), and co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008).

Lim received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and while at Cambridge, he was the recipient of the Sir G.R. Elton Scholarship in History, the Lightfoot Scholarship in History, and the Archbishop Cranmer Scholarship in Ecclesiastical History. Paul Lim has been selected as a Luce Fellow of Theology by the Henry Luce Foundation for the 2011-12 academic year. He was also offered a membership at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton. Lim will begin research for his next monograph, "God’s Problems: Revelations, Strange Providences, and the Religious “Other” in Enlightenment England" during his fellowship year. He has held a fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library (2008), and received the Vanderbilt University Research Scholars Grant (2008), and Vanderbilt University Summer Stipend Fellowship (2008).

His future research projects include: a study of the Protestant and Catholic attitude toward Islam in late-seventeenth century England; an intellectual biography of Isaac Watts, a key eighteenth-century Dissenting philosopher, hymn writer, and theologian; the editorial project of the Reliquiae Baxterianae, a key source in our understanding of seventeenth-century English culture, politics and religion.