Eric Carlsson

Biography

Dr. Carlsson is a professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies the intellectual and religious history of early modern Europe and the north Atlantic world, with a focus on the intersection of religion and Enlightenment thought, c. 1650-1800.

His research and teaching interests include the history of theology and biblical scholarship, beliefs about the supernatural, notions of death and the afterlife, skepticism and unbelief, Jewish-Christian relations, and theories of secularization. He is currently working on a book project that takes controversies surrounding the seminal thinker Johann Salomo Semler, reputed creator of Protestant “liberal theology,” as a lens for exploring some of the central debates of the German Enlightenment on such matters as demonology and anti-Judaism, “enthusiasm,” biblical hermeneutics, and public and private religion.

He teaches a range of courses on thought and religion in early modern Europe and the Atlantic world as well as a two-semester survey of themes in Western intellectual and religious history from antiquity to the present.

Academic biography

Research topics

1. Religion and the German Enlightenment
2. Theology and biblical scholarship, c. 1650-1800
3. Belief and unbelief in early modern Europe