Kirsten Fischer

Kirsten Fischer (Ph.D. Duke University) is Professor of History at the University of Minnesota where she is an award-winning teacher and the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships.  She was a visiting professor for two years at the University of Heidelberg’s Center for American Studies, once as a Fulbright scholar. Fischer studies non-elite people who participated in struggles of historic importance.  Her first book, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina, showed how sexual relationships and the laws and customs that either outlawed or overlooked them helped codify the caste system and made race seem real. Her second book, American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation tells the story of a once-notorious public speaker who openly attacked Christianity in the 1790s in an effort to make way for a holistic and vitalist understanding of an interconnected web of all living things.

Prof. Fischer is currently writing a hybrid history/memoir of four generations of her father’s German family, exploring experiences of wartime trauma, political division, migration, memory, and belonging.

Project

Title: Religion and Radical Environmentalism in the US (four lectures in a Master’s level course in American Studies at the Sorbonne).

Keywords: Radical environmentalism, Climate change, Indigenous religion, “Dark Green Religion,” Evangelical Creation Care, Buddhism, Anthropocene

Hosting institution : Sorbonne Université

Selective bibliography

Selected list of the 4 or 5 latest publications (books, chapters, articles...)

American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

“Vitalism in America: Elihu Palmer’s Radical Religion in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 73:3 (July 2016): 501-530. 

“Cosmic Kinship: John Stewart’s ‘Sensate Matter’’ in the Early Republic,” Common-place.org (Spring Issue, 2015). http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-15/no-03/fischer/

‘Religion Governed by Terror’: A Deist Critique of Fearful Christianity in the Early American Republic,” Revue Française D'Études Américaines No. 125 (3e Trimestre, 2010): 13-26.