Mark Bell received a BA with honors and distinction in History from Stanford University in 1998. While at Stanford, he was awarded the President's Award for Academic Distinction, The Dean's Award for Outstanding Scholarship, the Advanced Prize for the Humanities, a Chappell-Lougee Research Fellowship, a Golden Grant and the James Birdsall Weter Prize for depth of historical research. He was also selected as the graduation speaker for Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford. During his time at Stanford, Bell served on the editorial board for the Dualist, a philosophy journal and Herodotus, Stanford's undergraduate history journal. In 1998 he was the senior editor of Herodotus.

In 1998 Bell received a US-British Marshall Scholarship and matriculated at Oxford University. In 1999 he completed his Masters of Studies in Historical Research (M.St.) in the Faculty of Modern History, for which he received distinction. He is currently at Balliol College, Oxford, completing his doctoral dissertation on the early English Presbyterian divine Stephen Marshall.

Mark's first book, Apocalypse How? Baptist Movements During the English Revolution is due to appear in Spring 2000 from Mercer University Press. He has also worked for Oxford University Press on the New Dictionary of National Biography. Mark participated in the 1999 British Association for the Study of Religion conference on religion and violence in Scotland and the Center for Millennial Studies fourth annual conference in Boston. His article "The Revolutionary Roots of Anglo-American Millenarianism: Robert Maton's Israel's Redemption and Christ's Personal Reign on Earth" is due to appear in the winter 1999 edition of the Journal of Millennial Studies.

Bell's long-term research interests focus on the interaction between religion and political movements. He is a founding member of the Project on Religion and Revolution, which seeks to bring interdisciplinary methods to bear on the study of religion and politics. He is currently an associate editor for the Southern Historian and the recipient of the Journal of Southern Religion's Sam Hill award for his article titled "Continued Captivity: Religion in Bartow County Georgia".

The Journal of Southern Religion wishes to express special thanks to following publishers who contributed to the Sam Hill Award

• University of Alabama Press
• Mercer University Press
• The University of North Carolina Press

University of Tennessee Press