Jonathan Yeager | University of Tennessee Chattanooga (original) (raw)

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and currently UC Foundation Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. At UTC, I teach courses in religious history and Christian thought. My research focuses primarily on the history of evangelicalism and the history of the book in America and Britain.

My first book entitled, "Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine" (OUP, 2011), is about eighteenth-century Scotland's leading evangelical. Erskine was a wealthy laird, Presbyterian minister, and theologian who corresponded regularly with evangelicals in Britain, such as Phillip Doddridge and George Whitefield as well as the English Baptists Andrew Fuller, John Collett Ryland, and John Ryland Jr., Americans, including Joseph Bellamy, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Foxcroft, Samuel Hopkins, Thomas Prince, Ezra Stiles, and John Witherspoon, and Europeans like Gijsbert Bonnet of Utrecht. One of the arguments in the book is that Erskine's main contribution to evangelicalism was as a disseminator, primarily of philosophical and theological works. Erskine donated thousands of books to American institutions, such as Harvard, Yale, the College of New Jersey (Princeton), Dartmouth, and Dickinson College as well as his correspondents. John Ryland Jr., for example, received some 400 texts from Erskine over roughly a twenty year period. The book also highlights Erskine's role in keeping Wesleyan Methodism from gaining ground in Scotland as well as his suspicions of Catholics (particularly Jesuits).

My second book is an eighteenth-century anthology entitled, "Early Evangelicalism: A Reader," that I hope will be used as a textbook for courses in religious history and the history of evangelicalism. Published by Oxford University Press in early September 2013, this volume contains over sixty introductions and excerpts (conversion narratives, devotionals, diaries and journals, history, hymns, poetry, ecclesiastical politics, revival accounts, satire, sermons, and theological treatises) from a variety of well known and lesser known transatlantic Christians.

My third book-length project is a publishing history of Jonathan Edwards's works during the eighteenth century entitled, "Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture" (under contract with Oxford University Press). I will describe how Edwards's writings came to print in America and Britain while considering the wider transatlantic print culture at that time.

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