David Hampton and Willhelm Burkhard Simultaneously Recieve Methodist History Award
The United Methodist Church’s Commission on Archives and History, for the first time, awarded the Jesse Lee Prizes to two notable historians of Methodism. Both German pastor Friedemann Wilhelm Burkhard and English American pastor David Hampton were awarded $2,000 to assist in the publication of their manuscripts.
Unlike previous years, the 2003 selection committee for the Commission included a member from Germany whose credentials were comparable to those judges of the English-language entries; last fall, the commission received its first non-English manuscript.
Burkhardt, pastor in the deaconess hospital Martha-Maria in Munich, will use the funds to defray the cost of publishing his German manuscript; the English translation, entitled, Christoph Gottlob Mueller and the Rise of Methodism in Germany, will also be available.
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Burkhardt’s received his undergraduate degree in music and completed his doctoral work and post doctoral study at the Lutheran Faculty, Ludwig-Maximillians University of Munich. His doctorate, which dealt with pietism, was awarded "magna cum laude.” Burkhardt has also had several publications in Germany Methodism and church history reflect this interest, including one on Charles Wesley and one on Methodist hymnology.
David Hampton will use the award toward the publication of An Empire of the Spirit: The Rise of Methodism in the North Atlantic Region, 1730-1860. He is a professor of church history at United Methodist-related Boston University.
Hampton, a former professor of modern history and director of the School of History in the Queen’s University of Belfast, also served as chairman of the Wiles Trust, founded in 1951 by Sir Herbert Butterfield to promote innovative thinking on the history of civilization.
Hampton is the author of more than 50 books and articles, including Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1890, for which he was awarded the Whitfield prize of the Royal Historical Society; Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of the Empire; and The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion c. 1750-1900.
As a visiting scholar at St. John’s College Oxford, Hampton delivered several sets of endowed lectures, including the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham in 1994 and the F.D. Maurice Lectures at King’s College London in 2000.
