Thomas Kselman
Professor
Field
Modern France/Europe
Profile
Thomas Kselman is a specialist in modern France, with a particular interest in religious history in the nineteenth century. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at Notre Dame since 1979, including a year as director of the Angers program in 1985-86, and served as chair of the History Department from 1990 to 1993 and again in 2002-2003. His first book, Miracles and Prophecies in France was awarded the Shea prize of the American Catholic Historical Association as the best book in Catholic history 1983, and is also the author of Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton University Press, 1993). He has served on the editorial board of French Historical Studies and on the executive committee of the Western Society for French History, and is currently a member of the J. Russell Major prize committee of the American Historical Association, which designates the best book in English on French history in a given year. Kselman served as president of the American Catholic Historical Association in 2005.
Current Project
Kselman is currently working on the history of Jewish-Catholic relations in nineteenth-century France, and on the bearing of this issue on the emerging consciousness of individual religious liberty in the period 1790-1850.
Teaching Interests
Kselman regularly teaches two courses on French history, the first covering the Old Regime and the Revolution (1600-1800), the second the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also teaches a survey of nineteenth-century Europe, and at the graduate level offers a course on "Religion and Society in modern Europe."
Recent Publications
“Catholic Connections, Jewish Relations, French Religion.” In My France. Edited by Stephane Gerson and Laura Lee Downs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming.
“The Bautain Circle and Catholic-Jewish Relations in Modern France.” The Catholic Historical Review 92 (2006): 177-196.
“Challenging Dechristianization: The Historiography of Religion in Modern France.” Church History 75 (2006): 130-139.
“Turbulent Souls in Modern France: Jewish Conversion and the Terquem Affair.” In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 32 (2006): 83-104.
“Les congrégations françaises aux Etats-Unis et la loi de 1901.” In Le Grand exil des congrégations religieuses françaises, 1901-1914, Patrick Cabanel and Jean-Dominique Durand, eds. Paris: Cerf, 2005, pp. 257-267.
Contact
Office: 455 Decio Faculty Hall
Phone: (574) 631 7330
Email: kselman.1@nd.edu