C.V.

Thomas S. Kidd, Department of History

Resident Scholar, Institute for Studies of Religion

Baylor University

One Bear Place #97306

Waco, TX  76798

Thomas_Kidd@baylor.edu

Degrees

University of Notre Dame, Ph.D. in History (2001)

Clemson University, M.A. in History (1996)

Clemson University, B.A. in Political Science (1994)

Honors

Won Summer Stipend Grants from the Louisville Institute, 2006 and 2008.

Named a “Top Young Historian” by the History News Network, 2007: Top Young Historians–HNN

Won a 2006-07 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, supporting book The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America.

Baylor University Graduate Student Association Outstanding Professor Award, 2006.

Won a 2006-08 Council for Christian Colleges & Universities Initiative Grant to Network Christian Scholars (awarded to a group of four scholars studying western Christian views of the Middle East and Islam).

Baylor University 2004-05 Faculty Member of the Year, Baylor University Student Government.

Won a 2004 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.

Selected for the Young Scholars in American Religion Program, class of 2004-05, sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis.

Publishing

A. Books

  • American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism [Princeton University Press, available at amazon.com].

“This concise and well-organized study offers readers an excellent summary of American popular attitudes toward Islam from the eighteenth century onward.”–Walter Russell Mead, Foreign Affairs

“This remarkable book should be studied over and over again by anyone willing to understand the ideological origins of America’s enduring clash with Islam.”–Anouar Majid, Reviews in American History

“Kidd brings a deep understanding of both traditions to his analysis and brilliantly demonstrates how so many contemporary American denunciations of Islam–especially evangelical denunciations–have a rich history that goes all the way back to the Age of Exploration and the first English settlements.” Harry S. Stout, Yale University

  •  The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America [Yale University Press, 2007, paperback 2009, available at amazon.com]. Won a 2008 Award of Merit from Christianity Today magazine.

Reviews of The Great Awakening:

“Not another book on the Great Awakening in American history! No. This is a book to end all books on the Great Awakening.”–Edwin Gaustad, Catholic Historical Review 

“Well researched, clearly written and authoritatively argued. There is no book of comparable breadth, either chronologically or geographically.”—Mark Noll, University of Notre Dame

“An informed and much-needed synthesis of the events that comprise the ‘Great Awakening’…Kidd’s book will become the standard introduction to its subject.”—Philip F. Gura, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“With this deeply researched and beautifully focused study of the origins of American evangelicalism, Thomas Kidd gives us nothing less than a fresh, post-revisionist understanding of the Great Awakening.”—Wilfred McClay, author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America

  • The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents [Bedford Books, 2007]. Available at amazon.com.
  • The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). Available at amazon.com.

Reviews of The Protestant Interest:

“The significant strength of this work is the convincing case for rereading the early decades of New England’s development within an international transatlantic context. Others have made the case; Kidd has now settled the matter…Kidd offers a fresh and compelling case that explains important moments and developments in New England before the Great Awakening.–Michael McClenahan, Journal of Religion

B. Current book projects

C. Selected Articles

“Daniel Rogers’s Egalitarian Great Awakening,” Journal of the Historical Society 7, no. 1 (March 2007): 111-135. [available here through Blackwell Synergy, subscription only]

“The Healing of Mercy Wheeler: Illness and Miracles among Early American Evangelicals,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 63, no. 1 (Jan. 2006): 149-170. [available here through the History Cooperative, subscription only]

“Passing as a Pastor: Clerical Imposture in the Colonial Atlantic World,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 14, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 149-174.

“Recovering The French Convert: Views of the French and the Uses of Anti-Catholicism in Early America,” Book History, 7 (2004): 97-111. [available here through Project Muse, subscription only]

“‘Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet than the Devil?’: Early American Uses of Islam” Church History, 72, no. 4 (Dec. 2003): 766-90.

“‘Let Hell and Rome Do Their Worst’: World News, the Catholic Threat, and International Protestantism in Provincial Boston,” New England Quarterly, 76, no. 2 (June 2003): 265-90.

“‘The Devil and Father Rallee’: The Narration of Father Rale’s War in Provincial Massachusetts,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 30, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 159-180. [available here through findarticles.com]

“‘Man is not Perfect or Essentially Good’: Finding Perry Miller and Reinhold Niebuhr’s Common Ground,” Christian Scholar’s Review, 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 197-211.

D. Book Chapters

“Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2008), 169-86.

“‘Do the Holy Scriptures Countenance Such Wild Disorder?’: Baptist Growth in the Eighteenth-Century American South,” in Ian M. Randall and Anthony R. Cross, eds., Baptists and Mission: Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Baptist Studies (Paternoster, 2007), 109-29.

“‘Becoming Important in the Eye of Civil Powers’: New Light Baptists, Cultural Respectability, and the Founding of the College of Rhode Island,” in Roger Ward and David Gushee, ed., The Scholarly Vocation and the Baptist Academy: Essays on the Future of Baptist Higher Education (Mercer University Press, 2008). Available at Amazon.com.

“Evangelicalism in New England from Mather to Edwards,” in Michael Haykin and Kenneth Stewart, ed., The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (Inter-Varsity Press, 2008), 129-45. Available at Amazon.com.

“Patrick Henry,” in Gary L. Gregg II and Mark David Hall, eds., America’s Forgotten Founders (Butler Books, 2008), 119-29.

E. General Audience Publications

“Christians Demonizing Muslims? An Old Story,” History News Network, March 16, 2009. 

“Evangelicals, the End Times, and Islam,” Historically Speaking 10, no, 1 (Jan. 2009): 16-18.

“Barack Obama: Secret Muslim?”, History News Network, Nov. 3, 2008.

“The Surprisingly Democratic Roots of Evangelicalism,” History News Network, Jan. 28, 2008. 

“The Great Awakening and the Contested Origins of American Evangelical Christianity,” Historically Speaking 9, no. 1 (Sept./Oct. 2007): 2-4.

“Islam in American Protestant Thought,” in Books & Culture: A Christian Review, 12, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 2006): 39-41. [See also Martin Marty's comments on this article in "Muslim-Protestant Relations," Sightings, 9/11/06.]

“What Happened to the Puritans?” Historically Speaking 7, no. 1 (Sept./Oct. 2005): 32-34; reprinted in Donald A. Yerxa, ed., Recent Themes in Early American History (Columbia, SC, 2008), 67-72.

Review of Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York, 2002), in Books & Culture: A Christian Review (March/April 2003): 35.

Invited Lectures

“A Christian Sparta: Evangelicals, Deists, and the Creation of the American Republic,” Colonial Williamsburg, April 2009.

“American Christians and Islam,” Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University, March 2009.

“The Great Awakening,” Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, La., Nov. 10, 2007.

“Islam in American Protestant Thought,” Gordon College, Wentham, Mass., October 3, 2005.

Teaching

Associate Professor of History, Baylor University (2007-)

Assistant Professor of History, Baylor University (2002-07)

Courses taught: Colonial America; Era of the American Revolution; American Religion; American Constitutional through the Civil War; U.S. South from Reconstruction to the Present; Civil War; America to 1877; Early American Awakenings; History of Global Evangelicalism

Published in:Uncategorized ||on December 12th, 2007 |No Comments »