Participant Info
- First Name
- Dawn
- Last Name
- Shedden
- Country
- United States
- State
- FL Florida
- sheddedl@eckerd.edu
- Affiliation
- Eckerd
- Website URL
- https://www.eckerd.edu/history/faculty/
- Keywords
- early nineteenth-century Europe, Germany, French Revolution, religious history, legal history, nationalism, travel, borders
- Availability
- 1
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Throughout my career, my historiographical interests have focused around several key issues. The first is that of the evolution of modernity and of different ways of thinking. I have looked at this question from a number of different angles: revolution, law, travel, the creation of national identity and the reimagining of religious belief. Secondly, my framework has been that of biographical comparison. I enjoy taking multiple stories that intersect via time period and geography and lay them next to one another in search of patterns of responses to external historical movements. My third concern has been intersectionality, or seeing beyond the normal categories established by historians to watch how historical narratives speak to one another across older chronological and geographic divides. In other words, I like to think broadly using a microhistorical lens.
My career has been a varied one. As an undergraduate at Wellesley College, I did an honors thesis on the United Irishmen and the ways in which the French Revolution drew disparate religious groups together into a possible Irish nation that crumbled when promised French support failed to materialize. I then spent a year at the Universität Hannover honing my German, my ability to read old German script, and taking a range of courses in medieval, technological, and other European history courses. My master’s thesis at UNC Chapel Hill focused on three sixteenth-century visitors to Rome (English, French, and German) and how pilgrimage transformed their understanding of self. I did my Ph.D. at the University of Florida on three families living on the border between France and German-speaking lands during the French Revolution. I examine law, travel, borders, religious conversion, and religious mixed marriages. I hope to find a publisher for my book, “Border Breakers: Law, Religion, Nation and the French Revolution in the Rhineland, 1786-1848,” in the coming year.
- Recent Publications
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- United States
- Expertise by Geography
- Germany
- Expertise by Chronology
- 19th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Law, Local & Regional, Rebellion & Revolution, Religion
