Bryan Banks

Education and Certifications

• Ph.D., Florida State University
• M.A., Florida State University
• B.A., Georgia State University

Biography

Dr. Bryan Banks is a specialist in eighteenth-century French history, with a particular emphasis on the Huguenot Diaspora, the history of Christianity, the Enlightenment, and the Age of Revolutions.

Dr. Banks teaches the survey course in World History from 1500 CE. He also teaches upper-division courses on European and Atlantic History as well as the Digital Humanities. He is particularly interested in the intersections between digital media and public history. He regularly uses podcasting assignments in his class and recently has taught a class called "History Podcasting," for which students researched, scripted, and recorded a history podcast season.

Dr. Banks is also a co-founder and executive editor of Age of Revolutions— a digital public humanities website on the history of revolutionaries, revolutions, and the idea of "revolution" itself.

Academic Areas

Early Modern and Modern European History, Comparative Revolutions, Religious Studies, Digital Humanities

Research Interests

Dr. Banks is currently completing his book manuscript, tentatively titled Huguenot Refugees: Protestant Enlightenment on France's Frontiers, 1680-1800. The book explores the ways that Huguenots molded a refugee identity during a period of intense persecution in French history. Their diaspora, extending from the Netherlands through the West German kingdoms and into Switzerland and southern France, fostered an extensive epistolary network that promoted the Protestant Enlightenment. Huguenot theologians, philosophers, and pastors developed a sentimental philosophy based on their own refugee experiences in order to promote religious toleration, especially in France. They won toleration in the 1780s and the French revolutionaries even made efforts to court French Huguenots back to France in the 1790s.

Some of his recent publications include:

• Banks, Bryan A. "Jeanne de Lartigue : Calvinist Refugee and Wife of Montesquieu," in The "Wives" of Western Philosophy: Gender Politics in Intellectual Labor, edited by Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips. Routledge, 2020, 88–106.
• Banks, Bryan A. "Pierre Bayle's Revolutionary Script sans Scripture: Protestant Particularism and the English and Siamese Revolutions of 1688" in Revolution as Reformation: Protestant Faith in the Age of Revolutions, edited by William Harrison Taylor and Peter Messer. University of Alabama Press , 2020, 13–27.
• Banks, Bryan A. "Huguenots in the Atlantic." In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Oxford University Press. Article published October 2018.
• "The French Protestant Enlightenment of Rabaut Saint-Étienne: Le vieux Cé venol and the Sentimental Origins of Religious Toleration," French History 32, Issue 1, (3 March 2018); 25–44.
• Co-edited with Erica Johnson, Freedom and Faith: The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017.
• "Real and Imaginary Friends in Revolutionary France: Quakers, Political Culture, and the Atlantic World," Eighteenth-Century Studies vol. 50, no. 4 (2017); 361–79.

Dr. Banks is on the board of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850 and is a member of the Southern Historical Association's Snell Prize committee, which awards a prize to the best European history paper written by a graduate student from a southern university in the United States.

He has also given several conference presentations, including the following selected papers:

• "The Children of Cause Célèbre: The Calas Affair and the Religious Family Romance of Eighteenth-Century France," Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Tallahassee, FL, Feb. 27-29, 2020.
• "Ending the ‘Exclusive Empire of Catholicism': Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, Protestantism, and the Concordat of 1801," Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Atlanta, Georgia, February 28- March 2, 2019.
• Speaker on "Academic Blogging Roundtable: Networks, Perspectives, and Trajectories," American Historical Association, Chicago, Illinois, January 3-6, 2019.
• "The So-Called Republican Reformed Religion: Huguenot Republicanism in the Seventeenth-Century Catholic Controverse," Western Society for French History, Portland Maine, November 1-3, 2018.
• "Genealogies of the So-Called Reformed Religion," Repenser le refuge: Nouvelles perspectives pour l'étude du protestantisme francophone aux Provinces-Unies à l'époque moderne, Leiden, Netherlands, October 25-26, 2018.
• "Revolutionary Script(ure): Pierre Bayle, Huguenot Refugees, and the 1688 Revolutions in England and Thailand," Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Feb 22-24, 2018.
• "Subtle Protests: Rethinking the Edict of Toleration's Reception in Calvinist France," Society for French Historical Studies, Washington D.C., April 20-22, 2017. (Recording Here)
• "Digital Approaches to Religious Tolerance in the Enlightenment," George Rudé Seminar, Parramatta, Australia, July 15, 2016.