Daniel Johnson
Theology & worship studies PROGRAMME LEADER

Biography

Daniel’s PhD concentrated on Isaac Watt, the dissenting minister and hymnwriter. His thesis was a work of intellectual history, triangulating Watts as an inheritor of the Puritan tradition, who engaged with early Enlightenment epistemology, which helped to shape the affectionate piety of the Evangelical movement. Broadly, Daniel’s work has concentrated on the Evangelical hymn tradition. Prior to working at LST, he has taught at Nexus ICA, Coventry University, Buckinghamshire New University, and Birmingham Newman University. In 2024 he was awarded the International John Bunyan Society’s Early Career Essay prize for his work, ‘Isaac Watts and the Crisis of Dissenting Christology’, and later that year he was an Early Career Research Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Daniel is co-convenor of the British Nonconformity in the Long Eighteenth Century study group, which meets under the auspices of the American Society for Church History. 

Research Interests

Daniel is currently developing his PhD thesis into a monograph, Isaac Watts: Evangelical Dissent and the Early Enlightenment, which is under contract with Routledge. He is co-editor of The Legacy of Isaac Watts’ Hymnody, which is also under contract with Routledge. As well as these two works, he is undertaking archival research to examine the ways Evangelical missionaries used hymns to convert enslaved peoples in the British Atlantic world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and considering how hymns subsequently fuelled the abolitionist movements. 

Select Publications

Monograph: 

  • Isaac Watts: Evangelical Dissent and the Early Enlightenment (under contract with Routledge) 

  

Edited volume: 

  • The Legacy of Isaac Watts’ Hymnody: ‘Songs Before Unknown’ (eds. Daniel Johnson & Martin Clarke) 

  

Chapters: 

  • ‘Isaac Watts and Contemporary Praise and Worship’ (in The Legacy of Isaac Watts’ Hymnody, eds Johnson & Clarke, submission November 2024) 
  • “’Then Sings my Soul’: Towards a Methodology of Hymnology” (in Song Studies: Approaches and Perspectives, Amsterdam University Press, submitted May 2024) 
  • “’How Sweet the Sound’: ‘Amazing Grace’ and the ubiquity of NEW BRITAIN (in Amazing Grace 250, ed. Clark & Atkins, Routledge, submitted March 2024) 
  • “’Wash the AEthiop White’: Whiteness and Salvation in the Hymns of Charles Wesley” (in Hymns and Constructions of Race, ed. Johnson-Williams & Burnett, Routledge, Feb 2024) 

  

Peer-reviewed articles: 

  • “The Fairground is my Parish: Evangelical Preaching in Recreational Spaces’ (Wesley Historical Society, 2024) 
  • “’Let Heaven and Nature Sing’: Creation and the New Creation in the hymns of Isaac Watts”, The Glass, no. 34 (2021) 
  • “Isaac Watts’ Hymnody as a Guide for the Passions”, English Literature, no. 5 (Dec 2018)