Jonathan McGovern FRHistS is an English historian and author. He specialises in the study of Tudor England and has been a proponent of the New Administrative History.
McGovern was born in Derby and studied at Landau Forte College, then a City Technology College. He read history and English at St Peter's College, University of Oxford, where he won the Smith Prize. He holds a PhD in English from the University of York and has taught at Nanjing University, China. He is professor of English at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University.
He has defended traditionalist historical methods, arguing for the importance of empiricism in history "as a practical benchmark, not a philosophical position".
In 2021, he published his discovery of the eighteenth-century origin of the phrase "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest", which was formerly misattributed to King Henry II of England. The phrase actually originated with Robert Dodsley.
He was awarded the Sir John Neale Prize in 2018, the Gordon Forster Essay Prize (2018) and the Parliamentary History Essay Prize (2019). He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022 and is a member of the Selden Society, a learned society dedicated to the study of English legal history.