Professor Emeritus Wilfrid Prest

Biography/ Background

Wilfrid Prest, BA (Melb.), DPHil (Oxon.) , FRHistS, FAHA, FASSA, joined Adelaide's Department of History as a lecturer in 1966.

Apart from two years as Assistant Professor at The Johns Hopkins University, and visiting posts elsewhere, Prest taught history in Adelaide until 2002. He then he took up an ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship for a research project on the life and works of the eighteenth-century English legal author William Blackstone, moving to the Law School in 2003. His biography, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eigteenth Century was published by Oxford University Press on 25 October 2008, to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Blackstone's first lecture as the foundation Vinerian Professor of the Laws of England. Prest's final academic appointment before retirement in 2007 was as Professor of Law; he is currently Professor Emeritus and Visiting Research Fellow in History and Law.

A Fellow of Queen's College, University of Melbourne, Prest has held visiting positions at All Souls College, Oxford, Clare Hall, Cambridge, St Andrew's University, the Australian National University, Princeton University, the National Humanities Center, North Carolina and the University of Otago, Dunedin. In 2010 he began a two-year term as President of the History Council of South Australia, and in 2011 he was elected to the Council of the Selden Society.

 

Research Interests

Research

Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England : a variorum edition

  (Further information on this project is at http://law.adelaide.edu.au/research/blackstone/)

Corruption, political and judicial, in early modern England

The history of history, and universities, in Australia

South Australian history

 

 

Publications

Books:

The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts 1590-1640 (Longman, London, 1972)

The Rise of the Barristers: a Social History of the English Bar, 1590-1640 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986, 1991)

Albion Ascendant: English History 1660-1815 (Oxford University Press, London, 1998)

William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century  (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008)

Blackstone as a Barrister (Selden Society, London, 2010)

Full details of other publications are listed in the file attached below

Files

• Publications2011.docx [36.8K] (application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document)

Entry last updated: Tuesday, 18 Oct 2011