Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. She served as Chair of the Faculty of History between 2019 and 2022. She was an undergraduate and Masters student at the University of Melbourne before coming to Trinity College, Cambridge, for her PhD. After a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, she taught at the University of Exeter for fourteen years before returning to Cambridge in 2010. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013. She was appointed a CBE for services to History in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2017.

Professor Walsham's research interests fall within the field of the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and focus on the immediate impact and long-term repercussions of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations set within their European context. She has published extensively on a range of themes, including post-Reformation Roman Catholicism; religious tolerance and intolerance between 1500 and 1700; providence, miracles and the supernatural in post-Reformation society and culture; the history of the book, the advent of printing, and the interconnections between oral, visual and written culture; religion and the landscape; the memory of the Reformation; age, ancestry and the relationship between religious and generational change. Her current major project is a monograph based on the Ford Lectures she delivered at the University of Oxford in 2018, entitled The Reformation of the Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in Early Modern England. The research for this was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for 2015-2018. She is a is co-editor of the journal Past and Present and also sits on the editorial boards of a number of other journals. She has held Visiting Fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC and the Huntington Library.

Professor Walsham's books include Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Royal Historical Society, 1993); Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford UP, 1999). Winner of the Longman-History Today Prize 2000 and the American Historical Association’s Morris D. Forkosch Prize 2000; Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500-1700 (Manchester UP, 2006); The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford UP, 2011). Joint winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2011; winner of the American Historical Association's Leo Gershoy Award 2011; winner of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference Roland H. Bainton Prize 2011; Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (Ashgate, 2014); and most recently, Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations (Oxford UP, 2023).