Charles H. ParkerHe will be using the Bell collection this coming summer to conduct research for his monograph, The Wonders of the Wider World: Dutch Calvinism Overseas and European Protestantism, 1600-1800, which focuses on Calvinist (Reformed Protestant) engagement with non-European, non-Christian societies around the world during the height of the Dutch maritime empire. Published ethnographic and travel accounts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as those in the Bell Library collection, will form a core, evidentiary basis for the book.

Professor Parker earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Minnesota in 1993. He was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2010-2011) and is the Eugene A. Hotfelder Professorship in the Humanities at Saint Louis. His most recent books are Faith on the margins : Catholics and Catholicism in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge, 2008), and Global Interactions in the Early Modern World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 2010).