Kyle Roberts, BA (Williams), MA, PhD (University of Pennsylvania)

Dr Williams's Centre Associate

Kyle Roberts is interested in the cultures of print and faith circulating throughout the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic World. His first book, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (forthcoming from Chicago), is based on his 2007 University of Pennsylvania PhD and uses New York City as a case study for exploring the intersection of modernization, urbanization, and the expansion of evangelicalism in America's fastest growing city in the first half of the nineteenth century. His work is interdisciplinary by nature, combining methodologies from religion, history, literature, and material and print culture to reconstruct the ways in which different religious movements spread and the tools and networks critical to that dissemination.

As a postdoctoral research fellow from June 2009 to June 2011 on the AHRC funded- project 'Dissenting Academy Libraries and their Readers, 1720-1860,' Kyle reconstructed the holdings and borrowing histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century academy libraries in the innovative Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System (published 2011). In addition to being a contributor to the multi-authored volume, A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660- 1860 (forthcoming from CUP), he is developing a series of articles on virtual library systems, library history, and student reading.

Since September 2011, Kyle has been Assistant Professor of Public History and New Media in the History Department at Loyola University, Chicago. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on public history, digital humanities, religion, print culture, and North America and the Atlantic World in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.