Participant Info

First Name
Dawn
Last Name
Shedden
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
Additional Contact Information

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
Country Focus
United States
Expertise by Geography
Germany
Expertise by Chronology
19th century
Expertise by Topic
Law, Local & Regional, Rebellion & Revolution, Religion