Religion
Faculty / Resources / Graduate students
A wide-ranging group of scholars, representing African, American, Latin American, European, Middle Eastern, and world history, are currently working on the history of religion. The department boasts particular strength in late antique and medieval religious history and in religion in the early modern European, American and Atlantic contexts. UF historians have secured major grants both for individual projects and collaborative programs such as Faithful Narratives:The Challenge of Religion in History (Sept 08-Dec 09).
Faculty and graduate students at UF collaborate with scholars of religion working in other disciplines. The Department has strong affiliations with both the Department of Religion and interdisciplinary centers such as Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS), the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for African Studies, and the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.
Graduate students studying the history of religion work within a specific degree-granting section (American, African, European, or Latin American) but may take advantage of seminars and faculty in other sections to build a minor field in religious history. Recent minor fields in religious history include: Religion in Late Antiquity, Twentieth-Century African Religion, Medieval Religion, Historiography of Race and Religion, Modern Jewish History, the Reformation.
Faculty
Fernanda Bretones Lane (Caribbean history)
Nina Caputo (Jews & Christians in the Middle Ages; medieval Jewish history & culture)
Florin Curta (medieval archeology and material aspects of conversion)
Max Deardorff (early modern Spain, inquisition)
Norm Goda (Holocaust studies; Jews and the Holocaust)
Jessica Harland-Jacobs (religion in the British Empire)
Mitchell Hart (modern Jewish history; race and religion)
Anton Matytsin (early modern Europe)
Jon Sensbach (early America, African-American religion, religious awakenings in the early South and Atlantic world)
Resources
Smathers Library at the University of Florida houses a solid collection of Latin and Greek patristic writings; rare book collection with a strength in early modern religion; the country’s premier Latin American and Caribbean history collection; and an outstanding Judaica collection (particularly for Central and East European Jewry).
Graduate students take full advantage of the programs and resources of the following centers:
Center for African Studies
Center for European Studies
Center for Jewish Studies
Latin American Studies
Medieval & Early Modern Studies
Oral History Program
Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research
Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere
Graduate Course Work in Religious History
Recently Taught Graduate Seminars
Late Antiquity: From Pagan Rome to Christian Europe
Conversion in the Middle Ages
Heresy in Premodern Europe
Religion and Gender in African History
Religion in Africa and the World
Empires and Religion
Holy War
Early American Religion
The Gendered Body in Christianity, 200-800
Reformation Europe
The Black Atlantic
Mission, Conversion, Christianization, 200-1000
Religion and Reform, 1400-1750
Religions in the Atlantic World
Race and Religion in History
Undergraduate Courses with Graduate Sections
History of Christianity
Jewish History, 711-1492
“New Rome”: Church & Culture in the Byzantine Empire
Islam in African History
Orthodox Christianity
The Jewish Diaspora in Latin America
The Jewish Holocaust
Intro to Islamic Civilization
Muslims and non-Muslims in the Modern Middle East