Kenneth Loiselle | Assistant Professor

Dr. Kenneth Loiselle earned his Ph.D. from Yale University working under the direction of Professors John Merriman and Timothy Tackett. He is a European historian with a particular emphasis on the Enlightenment and French Revolution. His current publications and research focus on the history of private life and he is completing a manuscript on the practices of male friendship within French Freemasonry during the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods. An earlier version of this project was awarded Yale's Hans Gatzke Prize for the outstanding dissertation in European history. At the heart of this study lies the fundamental issue of trying to assess how ordinary people envisioned and cultivated the social relationship of friendship and the degree to which this bond of solidarity shaded into, complemented or came into conflict with other webs of obligation, such as kinship and conjugal relations.

Beyond the history of friendship and Freemasonry, Loiselle also maintains an active research and teaching interest in understanding the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Revolution, the Revolution in the provinces and the social and cultural history of eighteenth-century French Catholicism in metropolitan and colonial France (the evolution of cemeteries, clerical recruitment, missionary activitiy in New France, the language of sermons, etc.). Professor Loiselle is also an affiliated research fellow at the Center for Early Modern and Modern Mediterranean Studies at the Université de Nice where he is participating in a collaborative project on the history of European sociability, entitled “Circulations, territories et réseaux en Europe de l’âge classique aux Lumières.”  (Circulations, territories and networks in early modern Europe).

Dr. Loiselle teaches a range of introductory and upper-level European history courses, from 1500 to the present. Some of these include the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Modern Europe and French Empire in the Americas, 1500-1800.

Dr. Loiselle welcomes email at kennethloiselle@gmail.com

 

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