Dr. Kelly Kaelin

Current Research

Forthcoming Book - Women, Race, and the Moravian Church in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Convert, Migrant, Missionary

My first monograph project, “Convert, Migrant, Missionary,” focuses on women’s participation in the Moravian Church from 1730-1850, focusing on the intentional practice of international marriage and migration that supported their missionary work amongst enslaved populations in the Caribbean. I argue that white women missionaries and Black women converts played a crucial role in the history of its religious movement as the Church shifted from an ethnically German organization to a form of Black Atlantic Christianity.

This project is under contract with Palgrave MacMillan as part of their series "Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World" and is currently out for peer review.

Book Manuscript - "Heathen Europeans"

Tentatively titled Heathen Europeans: Racialization and Proselytization in an eighteenth-century German Church, this project will investigate internal religious proselytization in Europe in the late-eighteenth century. The project is inspired by the lengthy autobiography of Anna Kriegelstein, a German-speaking woman from Bohemia who fled the Catholic Bohemian crown’s persecution of Protestants and went on to become one of the longest serving missionaries in the Moravian Church, despite never leaving the European continent. Kriegelstein and her husband served as missionaries to Estonia and Latvia in the midst of several Russian conflicts and were routinely jailed while mistaken as political opportunists. She speaks of the targets of her proselytization as “heathens,” language that was contemporaneously employed towards the African and indigenous populations in the Moravian missions in the Atlantic. Further, Kriegelstein was a woman claiming authority in a religious sphere typically dominated by men. She maintained the mission alone during her husband’s multiple imprisonments and traveled extensively to return time and again to the Church’s base in eastern Saxony. Still in its early stages, this project follows my continuing interest in diasporic populations of German speakers as colonizing and “Westernizing” forces prior to the consolidation of the German empire in 1871 and does so through the women’s accounts of mission work.

I am currently conducting preliminary research and will present on a portion of Anna Kriegelstein's diary in January 2025 at the American Society for Church History Conference in Chicago.

What I'm Teaching...

Fall 2023:

HIST 101: US to 1877

HIST 298: Historical Methods

HIST 320: Nazism and its Aftermath

Spring 2024:

HIST 101: US to 1877

HIST 288: The Historian's Craft

HIST 420: The Age of Witch-Hunts

I teach a wide range of classes based on my interests in German and Atlantic history, women's studies, and religious culture. My classes change each semester and I'm open to innovating based on department need. I will be on maternity leave in Fall 2024.

Spring 2025:

HIST 101: US to 1877

HIST 298: Historical Methods

HIST 300: Family and Gender in Modern History