Kyle Roberts
	Title:	Assistant Professor
	Office:	548
	Phone:	773-508-2215
	E-mail:	kroberts2@luc.edu

Personal Information

Kyle Roberts is Assistant Professor of Public History and New Media in the History Department at Loyola University.  He teaches courses on public history, digital humanities, religion, and North America and the Atlantic World in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.  He is the Coordinator of the History Undergraduate Internship Program and the Co-Director of the Honors Program in History.

After completing his B.A. in American Studies at Williams College, he worked for several years in the museum field at Harvard University.  A passion for public history led him to undertake a Ph.D. in History at the University of Pennsylvania.  His dissertation explored the role the religious played in the growth of the modernizing American city and forms the basis for his first book, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (Chicago, forthcoming).  The study uses a broad range of source material and cutting-edge digital technologies to understand the urban religion of antebellum Evangelicals.

Since leaving Penn, he has held research and teaching posts at the American Antiquarian Society, Georgetown University, and Queen Mary, University of London.  In London, he spent two years working with a team of researchers, archivists, and technical advisors to create Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System, an innovative reconstruction of the holdings and borrowings of the leading English dissenting academies.  This novel Virtual Library System sets a new standard in the study of historic libraries and reader reception.  He is also a founder and former convenor of the London Digital Humanities Working Group.

Degree:

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania (2007)

M.A. University of Pennsylvania (2006)

B.A. Williams College (1995)

Specialization:

Public History and New Media; Religion; Early American and Atlantic World

Research Interests:

·         Urban Religion
·         Urban History
·         Print and Material Culture
·         Digital Humanities 

Select Publications:

Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System, with Rosemary Dixon and Dmitri Iourinski, (Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, 2011) 
 

Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming)

“Mapping Urban Religion in Atlantic World Ports,” chapter for the volume Religion and Space in the Atlantic World, edited by John Corrigan, David Bodenhamer, and Trevor Harris. (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).

“Rethinking The New-England Primer,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 104:4 (December 2010)

“Urban Religion to 1900,” in David Quigley, ed. Blackwell Companion to American Urban History (forthcoming, 2011)

“Locating Popular Religion in the Evangelical Tract: The Roots and Routes of The Dairyman’s Daughter,” Early American Studies, Spring 2006

Select Reviews:
 

The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons & Religion in Antebellum America by Jennifer Graber. Church History (forthcoming)

A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America by David Jaffee and Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia by Ann Smart Martin (joint review). American Nineteenth Century History (forthcoming)

A History of the Book in America. Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840, edited by Mary Kelley and Robert A. Gross. SHARP News (forthcoming)

The First White House Library: A History and Annotated Catalogue, edited by Catherine M. Parisian. The Journal of the Early Republic 30:4 (Winter 2010)

Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution by Benjamin L. Carp. The Journal of the Early Republic 30:2 (Summer 2010)

Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers by Richard Newman. H-SHEAR [H-Net List for the Early Republic] (November 10, 2009)

Exhibitions:

Books and their Readers at Dissenting Academy Libraries, 1720-1860, curated with Rosemary Dixon, Harris-Manchester College, Oxford University, England, March-June 2011

Select Recent Invited Presentations and Conference Papers:

“Student Reading in Nineteenth-Century Dissenting Academy Libraries,” Dissenting Studies Seminar, Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, April 6, 2011, London, England

“Dissenting Academy Libraries and their Readers, 1720-1860,” Harris-Manchester College, March 8, 2011, Oxford, England

“Virtual ‘magazines of learning’: The Dissenting Academy Libraries Project, 1720-1860,” New Perspectives on Library History, University of Liverpool, 28 Jan 2011, Liverpool, England

“Recreating the Intellectual World of Dissenting Academies,” American Society of Church Historians/American Historical Association Annual Conference, January 9, 2011, Boston, Massachusetts

“Faith in the Antebellum Urban Order: Religion and the Making of Early-Nineteenth-Century New York City,” Metropolitan History Research Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, December 8, 2010, London, England

“Crossing and Dwelling: Religion in the Post-Revolutionary City,” American History Research Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, October 21, 2010, London, England

“How John Ryland Read Jonathan Edwards: Material Texts and the Eighteenth-Century Expansion of Evangelicalism,” Material Cultures 2010: Technology, Textuality, and Transmission, July 17, 2010, Edinburgh, Scotland

“Reclaiming the Horse-shed: Religion and the Spatial Turn since Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment,” American Society of Church Historians/American Historical Association Annual Conference, January 10, 2010, San Diego, California.

Digital Humanites:

London Digital Humanities Group, Founder and Convenor, 2009-2011

Atlantic Space and Place Working Group, Participant, 2008-2010

Select Fellowships, Grants, and Awards:

Malkin New Scholar, Bibliographical Society of America, 2010

AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme Postdoctoral Fellow, “Dissenting Academy Libraries and their Readers, 1720-1860,” Queen Mary, University of London, and Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, London, 2009-2011.

John Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow, American Antiquarian Society, 2007-2008

Doris Quinn Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2006-2007

Reese Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 2006

Short-term Fellowship, Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, 2006

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow, The Library Company, 2006

Winterthur Fellow, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, 2006

Research Fellowship, Presbyterian Historical Society, 2006

Price Visiting Research Fellowship, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, 2005

History Department Teaching Assistant of the Year, 2003

Courses:

History 111: The United States to 1865

History 300: Senior Capstone

History 365: Creation of the American Republic, 1763-1801

History 397: Honors Tutorial

History 398: History Internship

History 410: Religion in North America/Atlantic World, 1600-1900

History 479: Public History New Media