Eric Carlsson

Position title: Teaching Professor of History

Phone: 608.263.1849

Address:
Office: 5217 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5034 Mosse Humanities
Office Hours: Wednesday 11:00am-1:00pm and by appointment

Biography

I am a historian of early modern Europe with an emphasis on intellectual and religious history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

My research and teaching center on the Enlightenment, early modern Christianity, the supernatural, skepticism and unbelief, the history of theology and biblical scholarship, and theories of secularization. I am currently writing a book on Johann Salomo Semler, a founder of Protestant “liberal theology.” The project takes Semler as a lens for exploring the German Enlightenment’s central debates on demonology, religious “enthusiasm,” biblical criticism, Jewish–Christian relations, and public and private religion.

I teach courses on religion, ideas, and culture in early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, as well as a two-semester survey of Western intellectual and religious history from antiquity to the present.

Education

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.Div., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
B.A., University of Michigan

Selected Publications

“The Protestant Enlightenment.” In The Oxford History of Modern German Theology, vol. 1, ed. Grant Kaplan and Kevin Vander Schel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
“Eighteenth-Century Neology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600-1800, ed. Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard Muller, and A. G. Roeber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
“Pietism and Enlightenment Theology’s Historical Turn: The Case of Johann Salomo Semler.” In The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, ed. Christian T. Collins Winn, et al. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011).
“The Eighteenth Century,” “The Enlightenment,” “Johann Lorenz von Mosheim,” “Johann Salomo Semler,” and “Rationalism.” In Dictionary of Luther and the Lutheran Traditions, ed. Timothy J. Wengert, et al. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017).

Selected Awards

Fellowship for Enlightenment Studies, Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
Excellence in Teaching and Student Engagement Award, Department of History, UW–Madison
Distinguished Honors Faculty Award, College of Letters & Science, UW-Madison
Fellow of the UW–Madison Teaching Academy
University Housing Honored Instructor, UW–Madison

History Courses

History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: Religion and the Enlightenment
History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: Belief and Unbelief in Early Modern Europe
History 208 – Western Intellectual and Religious History to 1500
History 209 – Western Intellectual and Religious History since 1500
History 229 – Religious Renewal in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800
History 409 – Christianity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
History 411 – The Enlightenment and Its Critics
History 600 – Religion and the Enlightenment
History 600 – The Supernatural in Early Modern Europe