Puritans and Prophecy: Cotton Mather and the Biblia Americana
3401 Dwinelle Hall
Jan Stievermann, Professor of the History of Christianity in North America, University of Heidelberg
Jan Stievermann will discuss his work transcribing and editing Cotton Mather’s hitherto unpublished Biblia Americana, the first comprehensive Bible commentary produced in British North America.
Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at the University of Heidelberg. He has written on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including articles for Early American Literature and William and Mary Quarterly. His book Der Sündenfall der Nachahmung: Zum Problem der Mittelbarkeit im Werk Ralph Waldo Emersons (Schöningh, 2007; The Original Fall of Imitation: The Problem of Mediacy in the Works of R.W.E.) is a comprehensive study of the co-evolution of Emerson’s religious and aesthetic thought. Together with Reiner Smolinski, he published Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana–America’s First Bible Commentary (Mohr Siebeck & Baker Academic, 2010). He is at work on a book, tentatively titled “The Ethnic Fantastic,” that examines issues of spirituality in contemporary ethnic minority literatures.
Presented by the Department of History with support from Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.
Image courtesy of the Mather Project.