Melinda Zook is the Germaine Seelye Oesterle Professor of History and the director of Cornerstone at Purdue University. Zook is a specialist in the history of political thought, religion, and women in early modern Britain and she teaches courses on English and medieval history, as well as on such topics as Shakespeare’s Kings, great books and the search for meaning and the history of toleration. She has published articles on radical politics, martyrdom, political poetry, women, religion, and teaching. Her book, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England was published by Penn State Press in 1999 and came out in paperback in 2009. In 2013, she published Protestantism, Politics, and Women in Britain, 1660-1714 with Palgrave, awarded Best Book on Gender for 2013 by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. 

She is the co-editor of Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World (2004) and Challenging Orthodoxies: The Social and Cultural World of Early Modern Women (2014) as well as Generations of Women Historians: Within and Beyond the Academy (2018). Zook is the founding director of Cornerstone: Integrated Liberal Arts in the College of Liberal Arts, which has become an influential model for general education reform nationwide and has revitalized interest in the humanities. Cornerstone has been featured in media outlets including the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and PBS News Hour.