Everyday Life, Central European Missions, and Global History

Please NOTE: This talk will take place in conjunction with the undergraduate seminar, HIST 3704W: Daily Life in Europe, 1300-1800

About the talk: This talk will focus on the religious entanglements between the Habsburg lands and the American Great Lakes region over the course of the nineteenth century by examining the financial, political, and spiritual contributions of the Austrian Empire to the Roman Catholic Church in North America. It uses the example of the Austrian Leopoldine Society, a nineteenth-century state-sponsored religious organization, as way to reveal the wider geostrategic qualities of Austrian overseas influence and, what we might term, soft power in the long nineteenth century. In doing so, it will also demonstrate how everyday life both in the Austrian Empire and on the frontiers of the United States came to be affected by these broader, more global connections. 

About the speaker: Dr. Jonathan Singerton is Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in Global Political History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam). He is a historian of the Habsburg Monarchy and Early America, focusing on the transatlantic connections between Central Europe and the Americas in the long eighteenth century as well as the broader global dimensions of Habsburg history in general. He was previously Lecturer in History at the University of Amsterdam and a University Lecturer and Research Fellow at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His first monograph, The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy, appeared in 2021. He is currently working on a global history of the Habsburg lands and leads a research project on the Leopoldine Society.