Rate My Professor Stephen Berry

Stephen Berry is an Associate Professor of History and Undergraduate Program Director of History at Simmons University, where he has served in the History Department since 2007. He attended Vanderbilt University, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in history and fine arts, followed by a Master of Education. Berry holds a Master of Divinity from Reformed Theological Seminary and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Southern Mississippi. He received his doctoral degree from Duke University’s graduate program in religion, with qualifying examinations in colonial American history, the history of religion in America, Reformation Europe, and Atlantic World travel literature. His dissertation, “Seaborne Conversions 1700-1800,” examined the role of religion aboard eighteenth-century British sailing vessels crossing the Atlantic.

Berry’s research centers on American cultural history, exploring the practice of religion in everyday life amid cultural, socio-economic, racial, and gender differences in the antebellum South and colonial British Atlantic world, with a focus on the development of functional religious toleration. His book, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and the Atlantic Crossing to the New World (Yale University Press, 2015), details shipboard experiences during Atlantic crossings to the New World. His current project investigates how American seamen mediated knowledge of world religions and cultures in the nineteenth century, supported by a joint fellowship from the Boston Athenaeum and the Congregational Library. Berry directs Simmons’s undergraduate program in public history, teaching courses such as History and Material Culture, Boston’s Past: Introduction to Public History, and supervising internships at local museums and historic sites. He offers undergraduate and graduate classes including The Atlantic World, 1500–1800; Interpreting the Past: the Craft of History; History of American Civilization I: 1607–1877; The African American Experience from Colonial Times to the Present; and Lives of Faith. As a humanities educator, Berry emphasizes developing students as critical thinkers and excellent writers. He has mentored undergraduate researchers, including recipients of the 2023 Senior Scholar Award.