Rate My Professor Paul Kerry

Paul Kerry is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Brigham Young University, where he teaches and researches in the areas of European history from 1749-1832, the Enlightenment, and the history of ideas. His work emphasizes German and European intellectual history, the transatlantic transmission of ideas, and historiography. Kerry holds a DPhil from St. John’s College, University of Oxford (1998), a Postgraduate Diploma from Oxford’s Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (1995), an MA from the University of Chicago (1995), and a BA from Brigham Young University (1989). In addition to his faculty role, he serves as Associate Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies since 2019, affiliate faculty in European Studies and Global Women’s Studies, and Fellow at the Wheatley Institution.

Kerry is the author of the monograph Enlightenment Thought in the Writings of Goethe: A Contribution to the History of Ideas (Boydell and Brewer/Camden House, 2001; paperback 2009) and editor or co-editor of nine books, including Friedrich Schiller: Playwright, Poet, Philosopher, Historian (Peter Lang, 2007), The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), Thomas Carlyle Resartus: Reappraising Carlyle’s Contribution to the Philosophy of History, Political Theory, and Cultural Criticism (co-edited with Marylu Hill, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), and Benjamin Franklin’s Intellectual World (co-edited with Matthew S. Holland, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012). He is currently associate editor for Thomas Carlyle’s German Essays in the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle (University of California Press, forthcoming) and contributes to the Woolf Institute’s Documentary History of Jewish-Christian Relations (Cambridge University Press). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (elected 2003), Kerry has held visiting fellowships at Princeton University, the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics’ Centre for Women, Peace and Security (2017-2018), the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Oxford, where he supports the Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government. He serves on the editorial review boards of several journals, including Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment (since 2018), the Yearbook of Transnational History (since 2017), and Carlyle Studies Annual (since 2009).