Our people

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is Associate Professor of History at Australian Catholic University.

She is an intellectual historian of early modern Britain with a particular interest in the intersections of theology, natural philosophy, and historical writing. She was awarded her BA with First Class Honours and the University Medal from the University of Sydney, and her PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar at King’s College. She then held a Junior Research Fellowship in History at Wolfson College, Oxford University. Her first book, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (London: 2008) won the Royal Society of Literature and Jerwood Foundation Award for Non-fiction. Her most recent book is Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age (Zondervan/HarperCollins, 2024), which was awarded The Gospel Coalition’s 2024 Book of the Year (Culture Category) and shortlisted for Australian Christian Book of the Year.

Professor Sarah Perrett  is Associate Director of The Faraday Institute, which she joined in 2020, when she was elected to Senior Membership of St Edmund’s College. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where she has led a research group since 2003 and she continues to divide her time between Beijing and Cambridge. Sarah studied Natural Sciences (Chemistry) followed by a PhD in Protein Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. She then held a Research Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge before moving to Beijing in 2000. She was awarded an OBE for services to UK/China relations in the scientific field in the 2015 Queen’s New Year Honours List.

Sarah is Editor-in-Chief of Essays in Biochemistry (Portland Press). Her research interests include mechanisms of protein folding and amyloid formation. She has published over 100 research articles and has edited three books.