Hunter Powell

Hunter Powell is a Senior Fellow at the Civitas Institute. A business leader, historian, and author, he serves as Managing Director of Bitterblue, where he leads the firm’s private equity division and investor partnerships. Formerly C.E.O. of Splice (acquired by GoPro), he has also held leadership roles at Morgan Stanley, Gartner, and in pastoral ministry. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in early modern history from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Powell has taught at the University of Texas and is widely published on the intersections of church, politics, and civic life.

Powell was the winner of the Archbishop Cranmer Prize and the Prince Consort Prize in the History Faculty at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of numerous works on early modern Reformed theology and ecclesiology, including The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–44 (Manchester University Press, 2015).

His recent publications include “Cromwellian Calvinism: England’s Church and the End of the Puritan Revolution” in The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism (Oxford University Press, 2021); “English Puritanism During the Revolution: Coherence, Adaptability, and Endurance” in The Oxford Handbook of Puritanism (Oxford University Press, online ed., 2026); and “‘Promote, protect, prosecute’: The Congregationalist divines and the establishment of church and magistrate in Cromwellian England” in Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c. 1635–66 (Manchester University Press, 2017).

He is co-editor, with Elliot Vernon, of Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c. 1635–66 (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is also the author of “October 1643: The Dissenting Brethren on the Proton Dektikon” in Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates within Seventeenth-Century British Puritanism (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).

Powell is currently working on Resistance theory debates at the beginning of the British Civil Wars.