Leighton Frappell, MA DipEd (Sydney), PhD (Macquarie), is an Honorary Research Fellow in Modern History and formerly Head of the School of History, Philosophy, and Politics at Macquarie University.

He was a member of the Association for the Journal of Religious History for some 30 years, serving as an Associate Editor for 18 of those years and as Review Editor for five. He has authored significant articles on the religious history of Victorian England, with particular emphasis on the Oxford Movement, as well as on the historiography of the continental Reformation. He is currently working on a study of John Henry Newman’s critical philosophy of history and supervising postgraduate research on the development of Newman’s doctrine of conscience.

Leighton is also the editor, with Ruth Frappell and Robert Withycombe, of the major reference work Anglicans in the Antipodes: An Indexed Calendar of the Papers and Correspondence of the Archbishops of Canterbury, 1788–1961, which relates to Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific.

In a different area of research, Leighton has a strong interest in Australian regional history. He is the author of Lords of the Saltbush Plains: Frontier Squatters and the Pastoral Independence Movement, 1856–1866, an exploration of the political and constitutional issues surrounding the attempt to establish a ‘purely pastoral’ colony—‘Riverina’—in the western division of New South Wales during the early years of responsible government.