Joel Iliff, Ph.D.

Bio

Dr. Joel Iliff studied history and classics at the University of South Carolina in his hometown of Columbia. He subsequently earned his M.Div. from Yale and Ph.D. from Baylor. Prior to joining the faculty of Regent, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

Iliff’s research interests include the American South, transatlantic intellectual history and Christianity and higher education. He also loves reading fiction (favorite authors include Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Walker Percy, Shusaku Endo, C. S. Lewis, and P. G. Wodehouse) and jaunting through the countryside to find old houses and churches with his wife and daughter. Like so many academics, he’s convalescing from what Walker Percy termed “angelism,” which he treats not by an ontological lapsometer but by pursuing embodied activities such as woodworking and gardening.

Publications

The Great Communion of Scholars: The American South, Germany, and the Creation of Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (book manuscript in progress)

Affiliations

American Society of Church History
Society for U.S. Intellectual History
Southern Historical Association

Awards

Travel Grant, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), 2018
Harriett Jackson Ely Prize, Yale University, 2014
Stipendium, Baden-Württemberg Foundation, 2014