Brad Gregory
Brad Gregory joined the history department at Notre Dame in 2003 after seven years at Stanford University, where he received early tenure in 2001. He earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University (1996) and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1994-1996. In addition to his training as a historian, he has two degrees in philosophy, both earned at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.
Gregory is a historian of late medieval and early modern Christianity, and of intellectual history in early modern Europe. His work is cross-confessional and comparative, devoted particularly to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholics, Protestants, and radical Protestants in England, France, the Low Countries, and Germany. He is concerned both to understand past people on their own terms in social, political, and cultural contexts, as well as to analyze the ways in which their commitments and actions help to explain change over time between the medieval and the modern worlds. In addition, Gregory is interested in issues related to historical methodology and the study of religion.
Professor Gregory’s current major project is a revisionist, narrative history of Christianity in the Reformation era, from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, which places more emphasis both on radical Protestantism and on religious controversy than do most accounts. The project is under contract with Harvard University Press.
At Notre Dame, Gregory teaches undergraduate courses on Christianity in the Reformation era and the Catholic Reformation, as well as the Honors Humanities Seminar for first-year students in the University Honors Program. He also teaches graduate courses on early modern Christianity.
His recent publications include:
Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
(Editor) The Forgotten Writings of the Mennonite Martyrs (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002).
Catholicism and Historical Research: Confessionalism, Assimilation, or Critique? in Occasional Papers of the Erasmus Institute (Notre Dame: Erasmus Institute, 2005).
“The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,” forthcoming in History and Theory (2006).
