Eric R. Schlereth

Ph.D. - History
Brandeis University - 2008

M.A. - History
The University of Missouri - 2001

B.A. - History
University of Missouri-St. Louis - 1998

Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2024). - Book

“Voluntary Mexicans: Allegiance and the Origins of the Texas Revolution” in Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon, eds., Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015).  - Book Chapter

“Privileges of Locomotion: Expatriation and the Politics of Southwestern Border Crossing,” Journal of American History 100 (2014): 995-1020. - Article

An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). - Book

“Mr. Owen Goes to Washington: Indiana’s Infidel Congressman,” Common-Place 15 (3): Spring 2015. - Article

“Religious Revivalism and Public Life,” in Sean P. Adams, ed., A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). - Book Chapter

“A Tale of Two Deists: John Fitch, Elihu Palmer, and the Boundary of Tolerable Religious Expression in Early National Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 132 (2008): 5-31. - Article

“Remembering Thomas Paine and Reckoning with Religion in Antebellum America,” in Ronald F. King and Elise Begler, eds., Thomas Paine: Common Sense for the Modern Era. (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 2008). - Book Chapter

Personal Statement

 I am a historian of North America and the early United States. My first book, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United States, explores the history of political conflicts between deists and their opponents to explain how Americans navigated questions of religious truth and difference in an age of emerging religious liberty. My most recent book, Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America, is a borderlands history of citizenship from the perspective of people who left the United States before 1870. The trajectory of my scholarship has thus moved from the lives of individuals who doubted Christianity to the lives of those who doubted the nation.