• Karl F. Morrison
  • Karl F. Morrison
  • Lessing Professor Emeritus of History and Poetics
  • Degree: Ph.D., Cornell University, 1961
  • Rutgers : At Rutgers from 1988-2011

Photo Credit: Jim Ballard

Additional Degrees:

M.A., Cornell University, 1957

B.A., University of Mississippi, 1956

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research has always centered on the history of ideas. I have worked on the history of political thought, on historiography (especially Church history), and on the mechanics of tradition. My work began in the early Middle Ages (western Europe), and I retain a continuing enthusiasm for research in that period. Currently, I am studying the history of Christian art in western Europe from the beginning until (arguably) its death in the nineteenth century.

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

Undergraduate

  • 506:411: Great Historians and the Study of History: Medieval Historians
  • 510:214: The European Intellectual Tradition
  • 510:309: History of Western Morals to 1500
  • 510:313: Renaissances in the Middle Ages
  • 510:315: Reform and Dissent in the Middle Ages
  • 510:391: Historical Studies, Christian Mysticism

Graduate

  • History PDR
  • 510:527: History of Religion

PUBLICATIONS

  • "'I am You": The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology and Art." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.
  • "History as a Visual Art in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
  • "Understanding Conversion." Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
  • (Co-editor) "Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005.

AWARDS

  • McKnight Foundation Award in the Humanities
  • MASUA Honor Lecturer
  • Fellow, Medieval Academy of America
  • Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
  • Page-Barbour Lecturer, University of Virginia
  • Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America
  • Rutgers University--Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research
  • Carey Faculty Fellow, University of Notre Dame (Erasmus Institute)

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

  • AHA
  • Medieval Academy of America
  • America Catholic Historical Association