Katherine Parsons, Assistant Professor of History

Katherine Parsons, an assistant professor of history at La Sierra, will store her belongings this June and fly to London for six to 10 months of research.

Katherine Parsons, an assistant professor of history at La Sierra, will store her belongings this June and fly to London for six to 10 months of research. She will traverse the country on trains to leaf through hundreds of fragile, bound letters, business records and other documents at St. John’s College at Oxford University, at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the British Library in London, the London Metropolitan Archives and Guild Hall, Lambeth Palace Library and Winchester Cathedral Library. She is trolling for evidence scattered in papers around England, looking for the story of the 16th Century relationship between St. John’s College and the Merchant Taylor’s Association. The business group had financial arrangements with the college and a say in who was allowed to teach there, how the institution should spend money and other matters. The relationship persisted despite the Merchant Taylor Association’s alignment with Puritanism, and the college’s bent toward conservative Anglicanism.

Parsons is researching “religious tolerance and how these two institutions who had such differences learned to navigate” one another and the Reformation. She plans to fold her research into a dissertation for a doctoral degree she is pursuing at the University of California, Riverside. “It is a historical narrative within the context of the English Reformation,” Parsons said.