Graduiertenkolleg
Visiting Scholars
Professor Christopher Cameron, Ph.D.
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2024
Professor of History, UNC Charlotte
Dr. Seth A. Johnston
Visiting Scholar Summer Semester 2022, 2023, and 2024
Dr. Seth A. Johnston is visiting professor at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, adjunct faculty at Georgetown University (Washington DC), and U.S. Army officer. A scholar and practitioner in European and international security, Dr. Johnston held appointments at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, Harvard Kennedy School, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. His book How NATO Adapts was the #1 most requested book at the NATO Library in Brussels. Former NATO task force commander and commander of U.S. Army troops in Belgium and Germany, he received his doctorate in international relations from Oxford University.
(Photo courtesy of Georgetown University)
Professor Melvin L. Rogers, Ph.D.
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2023
Melvin Rogers is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Associate Director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Brown University. His research interests are wide-ranging in contemporary democratic theory and the history of American and African-American political thought. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy and the forthcoming The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought. In addition, Professor Rogers has edited John Dewey, The Public and its Problems as well as African American Political Thought: A Collected History, a collection of 30 essays on figures in the tradition of African American political thought co-edited with Jack Turner. His articles appear in major academic journals and popular venues such as Dissent, The Atlantic, Public Seminar, and Boston Review. Professor Rogers also serves as the co-editor of Oxford University Press' New Histories of Philosophy series, which attends to the unstudied resources in the history of philosophy.
Professor David Komline, Ph.D.
Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow 2022-23
Starting in June 2022, Professor David Komline will spent a year at the HCA as a Humboldt Post-Doctoral Fellow, working on his research project on the Reformed Tradition in the USA. He will be collaborating with Prof. Dr. Jan Stievermann. David Komline is Associate Professor of Church History at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. As a visiting scholar, he has taught at Heidelberg University and Yantai University in China, among other institutions.
Professor Manisha Sinha, Ph.D.
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2022
Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition and the Civil War and Reconstruction. She was born in India and received her Ph.D from Columbia University where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft prize. She is the author of The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina, which was named one of the ten best books on slavery in Politico in 2015 and featured in The New York Times’ “1619 Project.” Her multiple award winning second monograph The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition was long listed for the National Book Award for Non Fiction. It was named Editor’s Choice in The New York Times Book Review, book of the week by Times Higher Education to coincide with its UK publication, and one of three great History books of 2016 in Bloomberg News. Professor Sinha is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including two yearlong research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as two from the Mellon Foundation. In 2018, she was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris, Diderot and was elected to the Society of American Historians. Professor Sinha is the eighth James W.C. Pennington fellow at the HCA. She taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for over twenty years, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal. She is currently writing a book on the “greater reconstruction” of American democracy after the Civil War.
Professor Susan Herbst, Ph.D.
Visiting Scholar Summer Semester 2022
Susan Herbst served as the 15th President of the University of Connecticut from 2010 to 2019 and is currently University Professor of Political Science at its Stamford campus.
Prior to her appointment at UConn, Professor Herbst served as Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Academic Officer of the University System of Georgia, as the Provost and Executive Vice President at The University at Albany (SUNY), and as the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University.
Born in New York City and raised in Peekskill, NY, Susan Herbst received her B.A. in Political Science from Duke University in 1984 and her Ph.D. in Communication Theory and Research from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication in Los Angeles in 1989. Professor Herbst joined Northwestern University as an assistant professor in 1989 and remained there until 2003.
Susan Herbst is a scholar of public opinion, media, and American politics and author of five books and many articles in these areas. Along with Lawrence R. Jacobs, Adam J. Berinsky and Frances Lee, she edits the University of Chicago Press Studies in American Politics. Her most recent book, A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion, was recently published by the University of Chicago Press.
(Photo courtesy of the University of Connecticut)
Professor Carol Anderson, Ph.D.
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2021
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award and the Myrna Bernath Book Award. Her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, examines how anti-Blackness is embedded in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the destructive force it has had on African Americans’ citizenship rights. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Anderson is the ninth James W.C. Pennington Fellow at the HCA. She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.
Professor Michelle Nickerson, Ph.D.
Fulbright Fellow
Michelle Nickerson is a historian and author who specializes in the history of politics, women & gender, social movements, and religion in twentieth-century America. She is Associate Professor at Loyola University Chicago.
Professor Nickerson received her Ph.D. from Yale University. In 2012 she published Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press), which documents the grassroots activism of conservative women in Cold War Los Angeles and explores the impact of that activism on the emerging American right. She also co-authored a volume of essays called Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
For her new project, Michelle Nickerson has turned her attention to the left side of the political spectrum with a project on sixties radicals. She is currently writing about the Camden 28, an anti-war group of the Vietnam era apprehended, brought to trial, and acquitted after raiding a draft board office in 1971. Originally designed to explore the Catholic church’s social justice traditions, the book has revealed a far more complicated story of ideology, faith, community, and personal relationship. This new project has benefitted from the financial support of several institutions, including the Gannon Center for Women and Leadership at Loyola, the Hank Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame and the Louisville Institute.
Michelle Nickerson is spending the summer semester 2021 at the HCA on a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship. You can follow her on Twitter @MicNick11 and find more information about her work at michellenickerson.com.
Professor Paul Harvey, Ph.D.
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2019
Paul Harvey, who received the eighth W.C. Pennington Award, is professor of history and Presidential Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He researches, writes, and teaches in the field of American history from the sixteenth century to the present. Professor Harvey is the creator and “blogmeister” of the nationally known professional scholarly blog Religion in American History and a contributor to the online journal Religion Dispatches. He is the author/editor of eleven books and numerous articles, most recently of Christianity and Race in the American South: A History (2016), and Bounds of Their Habitation: Religion and Race in American History (2017). Professor Harvey’s recent co-authored book The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, was named a "Top 25 Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice magazine in 2013. His narrative history survey Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (2011) also received the designation of "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice magazine. Professor Harvey is also co-editor of the reference work The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History. Other publications of note include Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (1997) and Freedom’s Coming: Religious Cultures and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (2005). In 2008, he was the Lamar Lecturer in Southern History at Mercer University. The University of Colorado named him Presidential Teaching Scholar in 2009, and from 2007-09 he served as the Senior Mentor to the Young Scholars in American Religion program at IUPUI in Indianapolis. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992.
Caitlin Smith, B.A.
Visiting Scholar
Caitlin Smith is a Ph.D. candidate and Presidential Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. In 2014, she graduated from the University of North Texas with a double major in music history and in literature. Caitlin Smith’s interdisciplinary commitments continue to inform her English Ph.D. Her current research focuses on doubt in American literature from the Great Awakening to the Civil War. Previous projects have dealt with print culture and musical practice in colonial New England, the incipient crisis of authority in sixteenth-century radical Protestant rhetoric, Melville’s formulation of propositional doubt and affective faith, and transatlantic literary responses to scientific advances in the nineteenth century. Caitlin Smith spent the academic year 2018-19 as a visiting scholar at the HCA, working with Jan Stievermann.
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Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Ph.D.
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2018
The seventh recipient of the James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellowship, Eddie S. Glaude is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at the Department of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University and the chair of the Department of African American Studies. He is currently president of the American Academy of Religion. He holds a master’s degree in African American Studies from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University. He began his teaching career at Bowdoin College and has been a visiting scholar at Amherst College and Harvard. In 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Colgate University. His books include Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016); African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction (2014); In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (2007); and Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America (2000), which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize. Eddie S. Glaude is also the author of two edited volumes and many influential articles about religion for academic journals. He has also written for the The New York Times, The Huffington Post and Time Magazine and regularly provides commentary on radio and television news programs like Democracy Now!, Morning Joe, and the 11th Hour. Currently Eddie S. Glaude is at work on a book about James Baldwin, tentatively titled James Baldwin’s America, 1963-1972.
Kenyon Gradert
Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Kenyon Gradert is a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the HCA for 2017-18. He earned his PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis in 2017, where he specialized in 19th-century American and African-American literature with a concentration in religion, memory studies, and cultural theory. In addition to several book and encyclopedia chapters, his academic work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New England Quarterly and Amerikastudien, supported by grants from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, Washington University in St. Louis, and more. As a former Fellow of Washington University's Humanities Digital Workshop, Kenyon often supplements this archival research with digital tools. His non-academic writing has appeared in The New York Times, Dissent, Los Angeles Review of Books, and more. As a Volkswagen Fellow at the HCA, Kenyon is currently completing his first book, Gospel Writ in Steel: Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination, a study of how prominent American antislavery writers embraced a revolutionary vision of their Puritan heritage to sanction an imaginative holy war against slavery.
James Strasburg
Visiting Scholar
James Strasburg is a doctoral candidate at the University of Notre Dame's Department of History. During the summer semester 2017, he was as a visiting scholar at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies as part of the Heidelberg-Notre Dame exchange program. In the 2017-2018 academic year, he will continue on at the HCA as a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, working with Jan Stievermann. His academic work concentrates on twentieth century American history, with specializations in American religion and foreign policy. His dissertation, "God's Marshall Plan: American Protestantism and the Democratization of Germany," explores the role of American Protestant groups in the reconstruction of German religious life and civil society after World War II. His work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Nanovic Center for European Studies, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.
Dr. Ridvan Askin
Visiting Research Fellow
Ridvan Askin is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in American and General Literatures at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of Narrative and Becoming (2016) and co-editor of Aesthetics in the 21st Century (2014), a special issue of Speculations, and Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives (2015).
Funded by the University of Basel’s Research Fund Junior Researchers, he will be conducting research on his second book, tentatively titled Transcendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism, during his stay at the HCA in the academic year 2016-2017. The book project builds on the premise that “romanticism [...] is a living, as yet unrealized possibility,” as Nikolas Kompridis has put it. Accordingly, it traces the romantic project from its inception in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries through the twentieth century to today. In order to do so, the book sets in with American transcendentalism, particularly the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, which it understands as the distillation and most succinct expression of romanticism as it incorporates and builds on the earlier European romantic discourse. The book subsequently traces further iterations of the romantic project in the poetry of Charles Olson, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, E. L. Doctorow’s novels, and contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. It concludes by risking a glimpse into the future and a romanticism to come.
Prof. Harry S. Stout, Ph.D.
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2017
Harry S. Stout is the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity at Yale Divinity School and the sixth recipient of the James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellowship. He is the author of several books, including Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (2006); The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (1991); The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (1986) and co-edited several volumes, among them Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Birth (2005); Religion and the American Civil War (1998); Readings in American Religious History (1997); Dictionary of Christianity in America (1990) and is currently coediting Religion in American Life, a seventeen-volume study of the impact of religion on American history for adolescent readers and public schools. Professor Stout is general editor of both The Works of Jonathan Edwards and the “Religion in America” series for Oxford University Press. He has written articles for the Journal of Social History, Journal of American Studies, Journal of American History, Theological Education, Computers and the Humanities, and Christian Scholar’s Review. He is a contributor to the Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching, Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, and the Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West. In 2003 Professor Stout was awarded the Robert Cherry Award for Great Teaching. In 2011-12 Professor Stout held the Rogers Distinguished Senior Fellowship at the Huntington Library. He currently serves as general editor and director of the Jonathan Edwards Center and is working with Tony Blair in the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, an organization designed to promote interfaith dialogue around the world.
Prof. David Wilson
Max Kade Visiting Professor
David Wilson held a Max Kade Visiting Professorship at the Geography Department and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies in the winter term 2016-17. He is professor for human geography at the Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also holds the Chair of Cities and Metropolitan Areas and is affiliate professor for African American Studies and Urban & Regional Planning as well as at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative Theory. David Wilson received his Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at Rutgers University and holds a master’s degree from Temple University. His research focuses on cities of the Rust Belt and their political and economic developments as well as on cities and urbanization in the United States and the Global West. His publications include Cities and Race: America’s New Black Ghettos (2007), The Politics of the Urban Sustainability Concept (2015), and Urban Inequalities Across the Globe (2015, Routledge). He is currently completing a book on Chicago’s new gentrification frontier and its invasion of blues clubs on the city’s South Side. Other current projects analyze urban growth regimes and the racializing of contemporary issues such as crime. David Wilson has sat on the editorial boards of Urban Geography, Social and Cultural Geography, Professional Geographer, Acme: the Radical Geographical Journal, International Journal of Spaces and Flows, and Syracuse University Press Series.
Curtis Urban, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Curtis Urban received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Notre Dame, as well as an M.A. from Miami University, and a B.A. from the Ohio State University. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame representing the Department of History in a teaching exchange program at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. His teaching and research focus on the history of Early America, specifically the importance of transnational connections for shaping the Atlantic World. His dissertation, “An Emotional Revolution: Fearing France in New England, 1754-1794,” explored how cultural exchanges between British colonists and the French during the revolutionary era influenced nascent understandings of American identity. His research has been funded by various organizations at the University of Notre Dame, including the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts. Currently, Curtis is editing his dissertation for publication.
Prof. Adam Seipp
HCA Scholar-in-Residence
Professor Seipp’s research focuses on war and social change in modern Germany, particularly the period since 1945. His recent publications include a book, Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Americans, and a German Town, 1945-1952 (Bloomington, 2013). He is currently working on two research projects. The first is a social history of the American military presence in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1945-1995. The second examines the role of testimony in shaping narratives of concentration camp liberation in the United States and Germany. Professor Seipp’s research has been funded by the Fulbright Program, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), German Marshall Fund, German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He currently serves as a DAAD Research Ambassador and is the 2015-16 A.I. and Manet Schepps Foundation Teaching Fellow of the USC Shoah Foundation.
Prof. James Cook
International Visiting Professor
James Cook is Permanent Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the United States Air Force Academy, a position he has held since receiving U.S. Senate confirmation in 2002. He earned his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. As a cyber and regional affairs specialist in the U.S. Air Force, he served in a variety of positions at the Pentagon and in NATO. In 2009 he deployed to Afghanistan, where he was senior-ranking U.S. advisor to the National Military Academy of Afghanistan. His academic research interests are in applied ethics, hermeneutics, and philosophy of literature, religion, and science. His most recent publications focus on the ethics of cyber and automation.
Prof. John Witte Jr.
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2016
John Witte, Jr., JD (Harvard), is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor, and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He is a specialist in legal history, marriage law, and religious liberty. Professor Witte’s writings have appeared in 15 languages, and he has delivered more than 350 public lectures throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Israel, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, and South Africa. With major funding from the Pew, Ford, Lilly, Luce, and McDonald foundations, he has directed 12 major international projects on democracy, human rights, and religious liberty, and on marriage, family, and children. These projects have collectively yielded more than 160 new volumes and 250 public forums around the world. He edits “Emory University Studies in Law and Religion” (Eerdmans) and “Cambridge Law and Christianity Series” (Cambridge University Press). Professor Witte has won dozens of other awards and prizes for his teaching and research. Recent book titles include: Religion and Human Rights: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012); From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Westminster John Knox Press, 2d ed., 2012); No Establishment of Religion: America’s Original Contribution to Religious Libert y (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment (Oxford University Press, 4th ed., 2016).
Prof. Robert Lemon
International Visiting Professor, HCA and Institute of Geography
Robert Lemon is a visiting professor for human geography at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and the Institute of Geography at Heidelberg University. He is a cultural and urban geographer with a passion for landscape studies. As an urban geographer and environmental designer, he has studied extensively the social practices and built transformations of cities through their aesthetic representation. But it is his love for the visual arts and innovative design processes that motivates his work. In addition to academic pursuits, Professor Lemon is a filmmaker. He has produced and directed two documentaries. His latest documentary feature, Transfusion, tells the story of a Mexican woman’s migration to Ohio, of her struggle for American citizenship through her street food practices in an all-black neighborhood in Columbus, and the foodways from San Luis Potosí. Professor Lemon earned his undergraduate degree in both history and geography from the University of Texas at Austin. He continued his education at the Ohio State University, where he earned his Masters in City and Regional Planning. He then went on to complete a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Finally, he returned to the University of Texas at Austin where he earned his Ph.D. in geography. He is also a former lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
Prof. William L. Andrews
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2015
William L. Andrews is the E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the fourth recipient of the James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellowship. He received both his M.A. and his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Before his appointment at UNC, Professor Andrews taught at Texas Tech University, the University of Wisconsin Madison, Justus Liebig University, Gießen, and the University of Kansas. His first book, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980), deals with a seminal figure in the development of African American and Southern American prose fiction. To Tell a Free Story (1988) is a history of African American autobiography up to 1865 and sparked Professor Andrews’ interest in autobiography studies. Since 1988 he has been general editor of Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography. Since the mid-1980s, Professor Andrews has edited a considerable amount of African American and southern literature and criticism. This work has resulted in three big collaborative projects, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1997). Professor Andrews is currently the series editor of North American Slave Narratives, Beginnings to 1920, a complete digitized library of autobiographies and biographies of North American slaves and ex-slaves, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ameritech, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He continues to study the historical linkages between white and black writers in the formation of American literature, African American literature, and southern literature.
Prof. Giovanni Bernardini
International Visiting Research Fellow
Giovanni Bernardini is a researcher at the Historical Institute for German-Italian Studies in Trento (Italy). He graduated in political science at the faculty "Cesare Alfieri," Florence (Italy) in 2000 and earned his Ph.D. in the history of international relations from the University of Florence in 2005 with a thesis on the relations between the U.S. administration and the government of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1969 and 1974. He was a research fellow at the Department of International Studies, University of Padua (Italy) between 2006 and 2010. His new research focuses on social engineering as a key concept for Western Europe and the Transatlantic space during the postwar decades. He spent the summer semester 2015 as a visiting research fellow at the HCA.
Prof. Matthew Sutton
HCA Scholar-in-Residence
Marsilius Gastprofessor 2014/2015
Matthew Sutton comes to the HCA as the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University, where he teaches courses in 20th century United States history, cultural history, and religious history. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California in Santa Barbara. Professor Sutton’s most recent book American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) is the first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation. It shows how a group of radical Protestants, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it. Perceiving the United States as besieged by Satanic forces— communism and secularism, family breakdown, and government encroachment—Billy Sunday, Charles Fuller, Billy Graham, and others took to the pulpit and airwaves to explain how Biblical end-times prophecy made sense of a world ravaged by global wars, genocide, and the threat of nuclear extinction. Professor Sutton has also written a textbook, Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents, as part of the popular Bedford “History and Culture” series (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012). His first book, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007), won the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press, awarded annually to the best book in any discipline by a first-time author. The book also served as the basis for the Public Broadcasting Service documentary Sister Aimee, part of PBS’s American Experience series. Sutton has published articles in the Journal of American History, Religion & American Culture, Church History, the Journal of Policy History, and the Public Historian as well as in numerous edited collections and the New York Times. Professor Sutton spent the 2012-2013 academic year as the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College Dublin (on a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant). He has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Sutton has been featured on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and MSNBC’s The Last Word, among many other news shows. He has lectured on religion, politics, and American culture across the US and in universities in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Germany. Professor Sutton’s new research is for a book tentatively entitled God and the CIA: Religion and American Espionage. He is also currently co-editing a collection of essays on American Faith in the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 2016), which uses history to explore how religion is shaping the modern world.
Prof. Laurie Maffly-Kipp
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2014
Laurie Maffly-Kipp is a Distinguished Professor at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and the third recipient of the James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellowship. She received her B.A. from Amherst College in English and Religion and completed a Ph.D. in American History at Yale University. Prior to joining the Danforth Center in 2013, Professor Maffly-Kipp was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she taught in Religious Studies and American Studies. Her research and teaching focus is on African-American religions, religion in the Pacific borderlands of the Americas, and issues of intercultural contact. Professor Maffly-Kipp’s publications are many and include: Religion and Society in Frontier California (1994), which explores the nature of Protestant spiritual practices in Gold Rush California; articles on Mormon-Protestant conflicts in the Pacific Islands, African-Americans in Haiti and Africa, and Protestant outreach to Chinese immigrants in California; a volume of essays entitled Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965 (2006) with Leigh Schmidt and Mark Valeri; a co-edited collection of essays about Mormonism in the Pacific World, Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier (2008). Most recently she authored Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (2010); American Scriptures, a Penguin Classics anthology of sacred texts (2010); and Women’s Work, a co-edited collection of writings by African-American women historians (2010). Currently she is working on a survey of Mormonism in American life that will be published by Basic Books.
Prof. Dr. John Turner
HCA Scholar-in-Residence
John Turner teaches and writes about the history of religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. He is the author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard University Press, 2012) and Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), and winner of Christianity Today's 2009 award for History/Biography. He blogs for Religion in American History and The Anxious Bench, and has written for popular outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.
Prof. Dr. Mark Wilson
International Visiting Professor
Mark R. Wilson is visiting the HCA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where he is an associate professor of history. He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of Chicago. Professor Wilson specializes in the history of U.S. military-industrial relations. In 2004-05, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. His first book, The Business of Civil War, was published in 2006 by Johns Hopkins University Press. In 2012-13, he held a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wilson is presently serving as a trustee of the Business History Conference, and he is completing his second book about the business and politics of U.S. industrial mobilization for World War II.
David Komline, M.Div.
Fulbright Fellow
David Komline, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Notre Dame, is spending the 2013-2014 academic year at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies on a Fulbright Fellowship. He is currently working on his dissertation, "The Common School Awakening: Education, Religion, and Reform in Transatlantic Perspective, 1800-1848." His research for this project, which draws upon archival sources in France, Germany and the United States, has been supported by grants from the Virginia Historical Society, the American Congregational Association in conjunction with the Boston Athenaeum, and several institutes at the University of Notre Dame. Before beginning his doctoral program he spent a year at the University of Tübingen on a grant from the DAAD. He also holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a BA from Wheaton College, IL.
Prof. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow 2013
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the second recipient of the James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellowship. Professor Higginbotham earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in American History, an M.A. from Howard University, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before coming to Harvard, she taught on the full-time faculties of Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she has served as a Visiting Professor at Princeton University, New York University, and Duke University. She also holds an honorary degree from Howard University. Her writings span diverse fields—African American religious history, women's history, civil rights, constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, and the intersection of theory and history. Professor Higginbotham has thoroughly revised and re-written the classic African American history survey From Slavery to Freedom. She is the co-author with the late John Hope Franklin of this book’s ninth edition (2010) and co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of the African American National Biography (2008), and its forerunner, African American Lives (2004). Professor Higginbotham was the editor-in-chief of The Harvard Guide to African-American History (2001) with general editors Darlene Clark Hine, and Leon Litwack. In addition, Professor Higginbotham is the author of Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920 (1993), which won numerous book prizes, and was also included among the New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of the Year in 1993 and 1994. Her current project is a book on African-Americans and Human Rights.
Prof. Saje Mathieu
Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence
Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, is the 2012-2013 Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence. Prof. Mathieu earned a joint Ph.D. in History and African American Studies from Yale University and specializes in twentieth century American and African American history with an emphasis on immigration, war, race, globalization, social movements, and political resistance. Her first book North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955 examines the social and political impact of African American and West Indian sleeping car porters in Canada. She is currently working on her next book, 1919: Race, Riot, and Revolution, a global study of race riots in the post Great War era. This new project investigates how black intellectual-activists galvanized new transnational models of political resistance in response to international outbreaks of racialized violence. Prof. Dr. Mathieu has earned several international awards and is a former fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. She is also the recipient of the University of Minnesota’s Arthur ‘Red’ Motley Exemplary Teaching Award.
Prof. Charles Postel
Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence
The Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence 2011-2012, Charles Postel is an associate professor of history at San Francisco State University. He has also taught at California State University, Sacramento, and at the University of California, Berkeley. Charles Postel earned both his B.A. in history (1995) and his Ph.D. in history (2002) from the University of California, Berkeley. An award winning historian of American political thought and society, he is the author of The Populist Vision (2007), a history of the original Populist movement of the 1890s, which received the Bancroft Prize in History and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, two of the most prestigious prizes in the historical profession. His new book project is Pursuit of Reform, 1865-1920, a new interpretative work on the post-Civil War reform movements that culminated in the Progressive Era. Charles Postel is also researching the historical origins of the Tea Party movement.
Prof. Kirsten Fischer
Fulbright Fellow
Kirsten Fischer received her MA and Ph.D. in history from Duke University in North Carolina. After six years at the University of South Florida in Tampa, she moved to the University of Minnesota where is is now a tenured associate professor of early American history. Her first book, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Cornell, 2002), shows how ordinary people, through their everyday interactions, participated in the construction of racialized thought in this developing slave society. Fischer also co-edited Colonial American History, a collection of scholarly essays and primary sources (Blackwell, 2002). Fischer's current research interests pertain to American religious history and especially the presence of freethought in the early Republic. She is writing a book about Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), an ardent advocate in New York of the most radical ideas coming out of the European Enlightenment. Fischer conceived this project when she was the Deutsche Bank Junior Fellow at the HCA in 2008-2009. That same year she returned as a Fulbright fellow, and taught a BAS course on "America in a Revolutionary Age." Fischer enjoys teaching, and in 2011 she received an award from the University of Minnesota for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education.
Prof. Albert J. Raboteau
James W.C. Pennington Distinguished Fellow
Albert J. Raboteau is one of the foremost authorities on African-American religious history in the United States. He is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion at Princeton University and was the first recipient of the James W.C. Pennington Award, a prize given by the HCA and Heidelberg University's Faculty of Theology to scholars who have done distinguished work on the African American experience in the Atlantic world. Prof. Raboteau has written the seminal book on Christianity among American slaves, Slave Religion: The 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South. He is also the author of A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History and of Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans as well as co-editor of African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture. His current work is on religion and literature.
Prof. Kenneth P. Minkema
Visiting Professor
Kenneth P. Minkema is the Executive Editor of The Works of Jonathan Edwards and of the Jonathan Edwards Center & Online Archive at Yale University. He has a dual appointment, serving as Research Faculty at Yale Divinity School and as Research Associate at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He has a B.A. from Calvin College, an M.A. from Bowling Green State University, and a Ph.D from the University of Connecticut. Prof. Minekma is a leading expert on Jonathan Edwards, who is widely considered the most significant figure in early American theology. He has published numerous articles on Jonathan Edwards and topics in early American religious history in professional journals including The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, The New England Quarterly, Church History and The Massachusetts Historical Review; he has edited volume 14 in the Edwards Works, Sermons and Discourses: 1723-1729 and co-edited A Jonathan Edwards Reader; The Sermons of Jonathan Edwards: A Reader; Jonathan Edwards at 300: Essays on the Tercentennial of His Birth; and Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”: A Casebook. He has also co-edited The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689-1694, dealing with the Salem Witchcraft crisis, and The Colonial Church Records of Reading and Rumney Marsh, Massachusetts. Finally, Prof. Minkema is currently part of a team being co-led by the HCA's Jan Stievermann, preparing Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana, the first Bible commentary written in the New World, for publication.
Prof. Rachel M. Wheeler
Fulbright Senior Lecturer
Rachel M. Wheeler, a 2011/2012 Fulbright Scholar, is associate professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and associate editor of the journal Religion and American Culture. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D from Yale University. Prof. Wheeler is a leading expert on Christian missions to Native Americans, having authored a critical book on the subject, To Live upon Hope: Missions and the Formation of Mahican Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast, which traces one Mahican Christian family from its pre-conversion days in 1740s Massachusetts to its annihilation in Indiana in 1815. Additionally, she has written over thirty articles, essays, and papers on the subject, and recently co-authoring a new textbook on American religious history for Cambridge University Press.
Photo: Courtesy of Indiana University
Patrick Roberts
Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence
Patrick S. Roberts is an assistant professor with the Center for Public Administration and Policy (CPAP) in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech University. He holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in political philosophy from Claremont Graduate University, and a B.A. from the University of Dallas. Patrick has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and at the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University. He has published in a variety of scholarly and popular journals, and his research has been funded by United States government agencies and the Social Science Research Council. His current project is a book manuscript titled Disasters and the Democratic State: How Bureaucrats, Politicians, and the Public Prepare for the Unexpected.
Rashida Braggs
Ghaemian Scholar-in-Residence
Rashida K. Braggs received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Northwestern University; she was also awarded an M.S. in Mass Communications from Boston University and a B.A. in English and Theater Studies from Yale University. Braggs recently served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Introduction to Humanities Program at Stanford University, where she taught in conjunction with Drama, American Studies, and African American Studies. In her book project, Before Jazz Was American: Exploring the Changing Identity of Jazz in Post-WWII Paris, she problematizes the idea that jazz is uniquely American by investigating collaborations between African American musicians and their French counterparts in postwar France. Braggs has published in Nottingham French Studies and The Journal of Popular Music Studies. Her scholastic interests have strongly influenced her extracurricular activities, as she has performed in poetry slams and jazz jam sessions.
Prof. William Grange
DAAD Guest Professor
William Grange is Hixson-Lied Professor of Theatre Arts in the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film at the University of Nebraska. The author of eight books currently in print, he has also written several scholarly essays, book chapters, journal articles, reviews, and encyclopedia entries. In 2007 he was named Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna, where he taught in German, concentrating on American actors, actresses, and American theatre history. He has also taught in German at the University of Cologne, under the auspices of the German Fulbright Commission and the University of Cologne Senate. Prof. Grange has also received numerous awards for his research and scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service in Bonn, Germany; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas; the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, D.C.; the Dorot Foundation in Providence, Rhode Island; the Mellon Foundation in New York City, the International Institute of Education, the Hixson-Lied Trust Endowment, the Jane Harrison Lyman Research Trust Fund, and several others. He has received the University of Nebraska Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Humanities and most recently a DAAD Guest Professorship at the University of Heidelberg, teaching in the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.
Prof. Jeremi Suri
Visiting Professor
Jeremi Suri is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History, the Director of the European Union Center of Excellence, and the Director of the Grand Strategy Program at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). More recent book publications include The Global Revolutions of 1968 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), and Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). His research and teaching have received numerous prizes. In 2007 Smithsonian Magazine named Professor Suri one of America's "Top Young Innovators" in the Arts and Sciences. His writings appear widely in blogs and print media. Professor Suri is also a frequent public lecturer and guest on radio and television programs.
Prof. Robert Cherny
Fulbright Visiting Professor
Professor Robert Cherny has served on the history faculty of San Francisco State University since 1971. His courses deal with the U.S. between 1865 and 1945, politics, and California and the West. His Ph.D. is from Columbia University. Cherny is author of three books on the history of U.S. politics, 1865-1925, co-author of two books on the history of San Francisco, co-author of college textbooks on American history and California history, co-editor of an anthology on the Cold War and labor and of a special issue of the Pacific Historical Review on woman suffrage around the Pacific Rim, and co-editor of an anthology in progress on California women and politics, 1865-1930. Most of his two dozen essays in journals and anthologies are on western politics and labor. He has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Distinguished Fulbright lecturer at Moscow State University, and visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne. He has been president of H-Net and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, member of the executive board of the Organization of American Historians, and member of the editorial boards of the Pacific Historical Review and California History.
Prof. Jeannette Eileen Jones
Deutsche Bank Junior Scholar-in-Residence
Jeannette Eileen Jones is a native New Yorker, who received her B.A. in History, with minors in Philosophy and Political Science from Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. She earned her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in History from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She joined the UNL faculty in 2004 and is currently Assistant Professor of History and Ethnic Studies (African American and African Studies). Her teaching specializations are in African American history and studies and the history of pre-colonial Africa. Her research focuses on American and transatlantic cultural and intellectual history, with emphases on race and representation in science, film, and popular culture.
Prof. Elizabeth Borgwardt
Fulbright Visiting Professor
Elizabeth Borgwardt studied history and law and earned her B.A. and M.Phil. in international relations at Cambridge University. She also received a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her permanent position is in the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is associate professor of international history. She specializes in the history of the United States’ role in world affairs, historical perspectives on human rights, and the history of international law and institutions. Her first book, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights, published by Harvard University Press in 2005, analyzes how planning for postwar international institutions transformed the idea of human rights in wartime American political thought. It has garnered several prizes. Currently, she is working on a second book project tentatively titled “Nuremberg: The Trial of the Century in History and Memory.”
Photo: Courtesy of Washington University St. Louis
Prof. Cesar N. Caviedes
Alexander von Humboldt Fellow
Cesar N. Caviedes studied and taught at the Catholic University of Valparaiso in his home country of Chile. After further studies at the University of Florence in Italy, he began his doctoral studies in 1969 at the University of Freiburg. His international resume continued at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and at the University of Saskatchewan-Regina. In 1980, he became the chair for Latin American geography at the University of Florida. Caviedes has received awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the Canada Council for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. In 1996, the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers awarded Caviedes with the “Distinguished Latin Americanist Career Award”. Caviedes has written eight books on Latin America, geopolitics, geography, and El Niño as well as numerous articles on these and other subjects. He is a member in the editorial boards of various journals and periodicals in the USA, Europe, and Latin America.
Prof. Richard Lehne
Fulbright Visiting Professor
Professor Richard Lehne received his B.A. from Reed College and his Ph.D. from the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. He has taught previously at St. Lawrence University and was Gastprofessor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitaet, Frankfurt/Main in the spring-summer semester 1993. Currently, he is teaching at Rutgers University, New Jersey. His primary field of interest is the interaction between the political process and industrial decision making, focusing on advanced industrial nations, especially Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His approach is presented in Industry and Politics: United States in Comparative Perspective (Prentice Hall, 1993). His current work examines the governmental decision process for programs to promote commercial technologies, and he has recently completed review essays in this area for the American Political Science Review and the Policy Studies Review. His earlier work concentrated on New Jersey policy issues and resulted in the publication of The Quest for Justice: The Politics of School Finance Reform (Longman, 1978); Casino Policy: an analysis of industry regulation (Rutgers University Press, 1986); Politics in New Jersey, co-editor and contributor, revised edition, (Rutgers, 1979); as well as numerous other articles and reports.
Prof. William Funk
Fulbright Senior Scholar
Professor Funk studied at Harvard and Columbia universities and practiced law in the U.S. Department of Justice, in the U.S. Department of Energy, and on the Legislation Subcommittee of the Intelligence Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. For the past 20 years, he has taught constitutional law, administrative law, and environmental law at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of several books and numerous articles, primarily concerning administrative law, and has served as the Chair of the Administrative Law Sections of both the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools. In November 2007, William Funk has been elected a member of the prestigious American Law Institute (ALI).
