- Professor of Modern History, University of Leeds (from 2011)
- Birkbeck Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History, University of Cambridge (from 2013 to 2014)
- Reader in Modern British History, University of Leeds (from 2004 to 2011)
- Extraordinary Research Fellow, All Souls College (from 1997 to 2021)
- Visiting Professor of History and the Social Sciences, the University of Chicago (from 1991 to 1992)
- Fifty-Pound Fellow, All Souls College (from 1990 to 1997)
- Prize Fellow, All Souls College (from 1982 to 1989)
- Research Student, Nuffield College, Oxford (from 1981 to 1982)
- Scholar in Modern History, Balliol College, Oxford (from 1978 to 1981)
- Religion and the secularisation question in Britain since c. 1850
- The history of All Souls College, Oxford, since 1660
- Modern political thought
- (ed. with Peregrine Horden), All Souls and the Wider World: Statesmen, Scholars and Adventurers, c. 1850-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c. 1920-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; paperback and e-book editions, 2012).
- (ed. with Robert Crowcroft and Richard Whiting), The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).
- (ed.) All Souls under the Ancien Regime: Politics, Learning and the Arts, c. 1600-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- (ed. with Richard Whiting) The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; paperback edition, 2002).
- Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, c. 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; paperback edition, 2002).
- Link to publications
- Co-editor (with G.C.F. Forster) of Northern History (from 1997)
- Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London
- Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
- The social history of religion
- Intellectual history
- The history of the universities
- British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow (from 2011 to 2012).