Honors Alumna and Rhodes Scholar Carol Harrison to Lecture on Women’s History and Vatican I

BATON ROUGE – Professor Carol Harrison of the University of South Carolina will be delivering a lecture titled, “Is there a Women’s History of Vatican I?” on Wednesday, March 9, from 4:30-6 p.m., in 241 Himes Hall. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Modern History Colloquium and the Voegelin Institute.  While at LSU, Harrison will also lead a workshop session for faculty teaching in the Ogden Honors College’s sequence on European civilization.

Harrison is a professor in the History Department at South Carolina. An alumna of what was then the LSU Honors Program, she won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where she completed a D. Phil. Harrison regularly teaches courses on European history, women in modern Europe, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, as well as graduate seminars on feminist theory and methodology.  Her published books include “The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation” and “Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith.” She is currently working on a book project concerning the topic of the lecture, “Women, Rome, and Catholic Cosmopolitanism in the Nineteenth Century.”

“Carol Harrison is one of the foremost historians of modern European Catholicism at work today,” said Boyd Professor of History Suzanne Marchand, director of the Modern History Colloquium. “Focusing on periods utterly neglected by other scholars, Prof. Harrison combines deep and painstaking archival research with wide-ranging and innovative insights into the social, cultural, and political world of the mid-nineteenth century, when so many elements of the modern church and modern belief first emerged.”            

The Modern History Colloquium is an occasional lecture series hosted at the Department of History. Speakers are usually visitors from other institutions who are invited to address any aspect of research in the Modern period (loosely defined, but usually comprising the period after ca. 1500 CE).  The Eric Voegelin Institute, named for one of LSU’s original Boyd Professors and a scholar of international recognition and acclaim, is a humanities and social sciences research institute located in the Department of Political Science and dedicated to exploring the ideas and questions that animated Voegelin’s thought.

For more information contact: Suzanne Marchand, 225-578-4454 or smarch1@lsu.edu, or James R. Stoner Jr., 225-578-2538 or poston@lsu.edu.