University Sermon on 'The Christian Movement in Africa'

The Ramsden Preacher must preach on Church extension overseas, especially within the Commonwealth of Nations.

Professor Maxwell was educated at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford and his early career included three years teaching in a rural secondary school in Zimbabwe. A Lecturer in International History at Keele from 1994, he was appointed Professor of African History there in 2007, before moving to the Dixie Chair in Cambridge in 2011.

David Maxwell has held Visiting Fellowships or Residencies in Australia, Switzerland and Italy, and been an Honorary Fellow at the University of Zimbabwe, at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand, and at the Département des Sciences Historiques, University of Lubumbashi, DRC.

Professor Maxwell's research interests include the 19th and 20th Century Missionary Movement, Missionary Encounter in Southern and Central Africa, Pentecostalism and Religious Transnationalism, Religious Movements and Politics and the History of Colonial Science. He has held major research grants from the ESRC and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

His publications include Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s-1990s (1999) and African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (2006).

In 2012 David Maxwell edited, with Patrick Harries, The Spiritual in the Secular, Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa.

All are welcome and there will be a wine-reception in Michaelhouse afterwards for those present.

Members of the University attending should wear their gowns. Doctors wear scarlet.