Alexander Batson
Assistant Professor
Alexander Batson is an assistant professor of intellectual history at the School of Civic Leadership. He is a historian of early modern Europe. His research focuses on intellectual history, jurisprudence, the history of classical scholarship, and the Protestant Reformation. His monograph project, The Secure Sea: The Greek Tradition in European Imperial Ideology, examines how early modern thinkers used ancient Greek literature and history to craft visions of empire based around limited, secure, territorial seas. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes, and Journal of the History of International Law, among other places.
EDUCATION
BA in Economics and Religious Studies from Clemson University
MAR in History of Christianity from Yale Divinity School
MA in History from Yale University
MPhil in History from Yale University
Ph.D. in History from Yale University
History
2025
“Philip Melanchthon’s Forgotten Protestant Civic Humanism” in Classical Reformations, ed. Lucy Nicholas and Micha Lazarus (Brepols), Forthcoming.
“Isocrates and the Persian Turks: Ottoman Invasions and Confessional Conflict in the Classical Scholarship of Hieronymus Wolf (1516-1580).” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 88.
2024
“Mare Tutum: Thucydides, King Minos, and the Concept of the ‘Secure Sea’ in Seventeenth-Century Maritime Law.” Grotiana 45.1: 1-31.
“Sinai and the Areopagus: Philip Melanchthon, Natural Law, and the Beginnings of Athenian Legal History in the Shadow of the Schmalkaldic War.” Journal of the History of Ideas 85.4: 713-48.
“On Ecclesiastical Discipline: A 1626 Transylvanian Unitarian Confession.” Translation of “De disciplina ecclesiastica Radeciana.” In Antitrinitarianism and Unitarianism in the Early Modern World ed. Kazimierz Bem and Bruce Gordon. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
2022
“Acquisitive Prescription in Early Modern International Law.” Journal of the History of International Law 24.3: 1-31.
“Philip Melanchthon’s Humanist Politics: Greek Scholarship in a Time of Confessional Crisis.” Reformation and Renaissance Review 24.1: 23-43.
2021
“Calvin and Equity” in The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism, ed. Bruce Gordon and Carl Trueman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
2016
White, Benjamin L. and Alexander Batson. “Paul’s Collection through the Saints: Romans 15:31 in Papyrus 46.” Journal for the Study of Paul and his Letters 6, no. 1: 99-114.
Spring 2026
CIV 303J Origins of American Institutions
Spring 2025
HIS 343/RS 344/CTI 355R The Age of Reformation
Fall 2024
UGS 302 Democracy: The History of an Idea
