Dr. Peter Forshaw has been elected as Assistant Professor for the History of Western Esotericism in the Early Modern period. He will succeed Dr. Kocku von Stuckrad who moves to the University of Groningen as Professor of Religious Studies. Dr. Forshaw's appointment at GHF will begin on september 1, 2009. Peter Forshaw researched his doctorate in Intellectual History at Birkbeck, University of London, and was then awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for research into the history of early modern magic. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, a Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, and Honorary Fellow in the University of Exeter's School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck. He is co-convenor (with Stephen Clucas) of EMPHASIS: Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination Seminar, which has been held monthly during the academic year in the Institute of English Studies, London, since 2003, and is elected council member and webmaster of both the Society for Renaissance Studies and SHAC: The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry. Peter's research focuses on the confluence of learned magic, science and religion in early modern Europe. At Strathclyde he has been working with Professor Jonathan Sawday on the 'Art of Fire', a project investigating the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century alchemical and magical works in The James Young Collection at the University of Strathclyde. In Cambridge he has been working with Dr Lauren Kassell and Dr Rob Ralley on The Casebooks Project: An Edition and Database of Simon Forman's and Richard Napier's Astrological Casebooks, 1596-1643. He is preparing a book The Mage's Images: Occult Theosophy in Heinrich Khunrath's Early Modern Oratory and Laboratory, for Brill's Studies in Intellectual History.