James Bratt, Professor, History
(616)526-6198
jbratt@calvin.edu
Office: Hiemenga Hall 478
Weekly Schedule
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Educational background
B.A., History, Calvin College
Ph.D., specialties in American intellectual and religious history and the history of immigration, Yale University
Research and professional interests
Prof. Bratt's principal teaching areas include U.S. intellectual and religious history, particularly in the 19th century, and the history of colonial America. Interim courses include the history of the American Revolution and, more recently, Film Noir in American Culture, which he co-teaches with Prof. William Romanowski of Calvin’s CAS department. An emerging interest is the history of U.S. foreign relations, which he will teach beginning in 2010-11.
Prof. Bratt's research interests on the U.S. side: changes in religion in the middle of the 19th century, exploring why the “Second Great Awakening” ebbed out and what replaced it on the religious scene.
Comparative history: a biography of Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), a Dutch religious and political leader whose life and thought are particularly relevant to current questions about church-state relations and the role of religious viewpoints in cultural affairs.
Recent activities
In connection with the 500th anniversary of John Calvin’s birth, Prof. Bratt presented a paper on the influences of Calvinism in U.S. political history at the conference marking the event held at Geneva, 24-27 May 2009. Prior to that he co-edited a book titled John Calvin rediscovered: the impact of his social and economic thought (Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). On the American side of his interests, Prof. Bratt published Antirevivalism in Antebellum America (Rutgers University Press, 2006), a critical anthology of primary sources from the generation before the Civil War.
Prof. Bratt is currently on sabbatical, researching and writing on Dutch theologian, politician, and scholar Abraham Kuyper. In the near future he will be working at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg (Zeeland), the Netherlands, where he will be the Fulbright-Dow Distinguished Research Chair in Winter-Spring 2010.
Life outside of Calvin College
Prof. Bratt enjoys reading and writing at the cottage he and his wife own near Lake Michigan. He regularly volunteers in local political campaigns and at a food program his church runs. His most pleasurable recent vacation was hiking in the Swiss Alps; in the future he hopes to travel to China to visit two sons who are studying there, as well as pay repeat visits to Philadelphia, where his two other children live. He fights the aging process by working out (cross-training and yoga) and thinks heaven will be a lot like the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Other information
Prof. Bratt is co-editor of Perspectives: A Journal of Reformed Thought.
See a partial list of James Bratt's publications.
