The International John Bunyan Society is pleased to announce that the 2024 Roger F. Pooley Early Career Essay Prize has been award to Daniel Johnson for the essay “Isaac Watts and the Crisis of Dissenting Christology.” The winner’s certificate and cash prize of £300 has been sent to Daniel by Professor Shannon Murray, IJBS President. The selection committee was chaired by Naomi Pullin, and its members were John Coffey, Angelica Duran, and Nigel Smith.

Daniel completed his Ph.D. at the University of Leicester in 2024. He is currently a Visiting Humanities Lecturer at Birmingham Newman University and a Visiting Early Career Research Fellow at the John Ryland’s Library in Manchester, where he is undertaking a study into the role of hymns in the British Atlantic world with a particular emphasis on their place in slavery and abolition. He is also co-convenor of the British Nonconformity in the Long Eighteenth Century study group, under the auspices of the American Society of Church History, and he is co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Legacy of Isaac Watts’ Hymnody: ‘Songs Before Unknown’ (Routledge). In addition, his monograph Isaac Watts: Evangelical Dissent and the Early Enlightenment is currently under contract with Routledge.

The annual Roger F. Pooley Early Career Essay Prize is open to all international Ph.D. students and to post-doctoral researchers within the first two years after their viva. Applicants must be members of the IJBS. The prize is for outstanding scholarly work in the field of early modern religion and Dissent, including its literature, history, and reception.