Paul Slack has been Principal of Linacre College (1996-2010) and Professor Early Modern Social History in the University of Oxford. He was educated at Oxford and spent most of his teaching career there. He has published on a number of topics in English history of the 16th and 17th centuries, including the history of towns, disease, poverty and social policy generally. His books include The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985), Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (1988), and From Reformation to Improvement: public welfare in early modern England (1999). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1990. He is currently working on concepts and practices of improvement in early modern England, and especially their relationship to early political economy. While at the Beinecke, he will be pursing research on this theme, especially from the 1690s onwards.