Joachim Whaley was brought up bilingually in English and German. He studied History at Christ's College, Cambridge, has taught at Cambridge since 1976, and is currently a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is the author of several books on religious toleration in early modern Germany and on the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period, all of which have been translated into German. He has written numerous articles on the religious and intellectual history of the German lands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.