This thesis explores the emergence of the Bourgeois culture in Antebellum America during the transition of nineteenth century America into what we refer to as “modern-day America.” This period is crucial in American history as ideological concepts developed as the nation industr…
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This dissertation is concerned with Enlightenment in a colonial and postcolonial setting. Its premise is that minority is a fundamental category of experience in post-Enlightenment liberal societies. It attempts a genealogy of secularism in colonial and postcolonial South Asia b…
Using the French Revolution's moral crusade and political inquisition as the centerpoint of its analysis, this study examines the importation of religious ideas and passions into secular affairs, beginning with the moralistes of the Enlightenment and ending with the early Romant…
In late-eighteenth-century Dublin, options were limited for an expanding reading public who wished to consult quality printed works. During this period of the Anglican Ascendancy, membership to institutional libraries or participation in associational activities was largely limi…
What or who is the modern subject? Are people sovereign, filled with passion, creativity, freedom and autonomy; or are we slaves, robots and automatons forever tied to the chains of civilization? It is very common to critique modernity. From the Frankfurt school to Foucault, man…
In the long nineteenth century all the English Protestant missionary societies in India used education as a missionary tool. This study examines their reasons for doing so and their attempts to implement various educational strategies. It also examines the theological and educat…
Despite long-standing recognition that the constellation of ethical and political ideas developed by the seventeenth-century Natural Law School played an important part in the development of Enlightenment thought, the relationship between the two remains a fertile area of resear…
This dissertation re-examines early Enlightenment culture and the religious politics of the post-Civil War British empire. Contrary to the overwhelming consensus of historians, it insists that the methodological, conceptual, and social repertoire of late humanism did not lead to…
This dissertation examines medieval Christian images of Muslims and their influence on later European attitudes toward Islam and Turks. It elaborates a theory of collective identity as the dramatic or theatrical performance of a socially constructed collective Self that can be a…
One of the questions at stake in contemporary theoretical debates over the legacy of the Enlightenment is whether the political violence that has been carried out over the last two centuries is inextricably linked to the rationalist values promoted by the Enlightenment. This cri…
A wise teacher will adapt the lesson according to the learning ability of the student. Depending on the student's level of comprehension, the teacher can alter the method of instruction in a manner that is best suited for the circumstances. God practiced the same strategy in his…
American studies and literary scholarship have long operated on the assumption that the United States has no official religion. That assumption has led naturally to a circumscribed and incomplete, if not inaccurate, set of traditionally accepted literary-critical conclusions whe…
This study explores the development of a discourse of global civility in English travel writing in the period 1636-1863. It argues that global civility is at the heart of cross-cultural exchanges in both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and that its evolution can best be t…
This dissertation sets out to rethink, contextualise and historicise a commonplace notion in the Scottish Enlightenment which poses nations and societies as either improving or primitive. The Scottish Enlightenment philosophers were the eighteenth-century pioneers in an intellec…
Rife with knowledge projects, encyclopedia-writing, botanical books, travel accounts, and other writing that we today would call ‘scientific,’ the eighteenth century is marked by an explosion of empiricism and rational materialism, re-shaping epistemological frameworks for under…
The most commonly ignored doctrine in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is his defense of his own critical methodology. This dissertation analyzes Kant’s statements on method in the “Discipline of Pure Reason” and a series of lectures from the 1760s and 1770s to prepare the way for…
he following dissertation takes up Alasdair MacIntyre’s challenge in After Virtue. He argued that the Enlightenment project failed western civilization, leaving moral chaos in its wake, which has led to the current state of western morality. He suggested contemporary ethicists p…
Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–1789), a successful portraitist famous throughout Europe during his lifetime, has only recently been awarded a place in the canon of eighteenth-century art. Born in Geneva, trained in Paris, and profoundly altered by his experiences during a five–year …
Several schools of psychology draw from Buddhist thought and use meditation and mindfulness practices. However, meditation for stress reduction differs from meditation embedded in a project like enlightenment. These evidences led to the hypothesis that Buddhism and psychotherapy…