Christianity

Description
Students in this area may specialize in any aspect of the history of Christianity broadly conceived including theology and religious thought, devotional practices and expressions, institutions and movements, social and cultural contexts, and lived religion. Students are expected to develop critical skills of documentary, artifactual and ethnographical interpretation, to develop methodological expertise appropriate for their chosen topic, and to familiarize themselves with the history of interpretive and historiographical traditions in their field. Although projects on all aspects of the history of Christianity are welcomed, the faculty has particular strengths in late antique, medieval, European, transatlantic, Caribbean, and American Christianity. Within those periods and locations there is particular expertise in the history of mysticism and enthusiasm, ethics and religious thought, race, gender and sexuality, radical, liberal, and evangelical expressions of Christianity, and African American Christianity and media culture. Students working on the history of American Christianity are expected to attend the bimonthly North American Religions Colloquium.

Recent Dissertations
  • The Cult of the Saints and its Christological Foundations in Eustratios of Constantinople’s De statu animarum post mortem
  • The ‘Eternal Return’ of the Byzantine Icon: Sacred and Secular in the Painting of Photis Kontoglou
  • Sainte-Anne-du-Petit-Cap: The Making of an Early Modern Shrine
  • No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns
  • Protestant Sainthood: Martyrdom, Apocalypticism, and the Meaning of Sanctity in Early New England Failed Pygmalions: The Conversion and “Apostasy” of Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan, Seventeenth-Century Montagnais Indian
  • God-talk in the Yard: Religion in the Nineteenth Century Harvard College Curriculum
  • The Irish and the Incarnation: Images of Christ in the Old Irish Poems of Blathmac
  • Traditionary Religion: The Great Awakening and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Southern New England, 1736-1776
  • The Map of the Cosmos and the Ascent of the Soul: Synderesis, Weight, and the Affect in the Thought of Bonaventure
  • Heaven in a Bottle: Franciscan Apocalypticism and the Elixir, 1250–1360
  • The Vital Landscape: Evangelicalism and the Culture of Nature in America, 1790-1870

Affiliated Faculty

brekus2018

Catherine Brekus

Chair, Committee on the Study of Religion
Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America
David F. Holland

David F. Holland

John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History
Director of Graduate Studies, Ph.D. Program in the Study of Religion
Ann D. Braude

Ann D. Braude

Senior Lecturer on American Religious History and Director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program
EDeLisle

Emma De Lisle

PhD Candidate
Christianity, Literary Studies and the Arts
Luis M. Girón-Negrón

Luis M. Girón-Negrón

William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature and of Romance Languages and Literatures
ON LEAVE Spring 2024
David Hall

David Hall

Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History
David N. Hempton

David N. Hempton

Dean of the Faculty of Divinity ON LEAVE SPRING 2021
Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies
John Lord O'Brian Professor of Divinity
Amy Hollywood

Amy Hollywood

Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies
ON LEAVE Fall 2023
Jordan

Mark D. Jordan

Andrew W. Mellon Research Professor of Christian Thought
James Kloppenberg

James Kloppenberg

Harvard College Professor and David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History
Dan McKanan

Dan McKanan

Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity
Matthew Potts

Matthew L. Potts

Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Charles M. Stang

Charles M. Stang

Professor of Early Christian Thought
Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions
Nicholas Watson

Nicholas Watson

Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature