Jeffrey Watt
Kelly Gene Cook, Sr. Professor of History
Phone Number: (662)915-5805
Email: hswatt@olemiss.edu
https://history.olemiss.edu/jeffrey-r-watt-professor/

Key Words: Early Modern Europe, Family, Social, Religion, Witchcraft

Research Description: Jeffrey R. Watt joined the University of Mississippi faculty in 1988 and teaches lecture courses on the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the age of Absolutism and Enlightenment and seminars on women and the family in medieval and early modern Europe, historiography of European history to 1815, early modern social history, and witchcraft. He is the author of The Consistory and Social Discipline in Calvin's Geneva (University of Rochester Press, 2020); The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent (University of Rochester Press, 2009), Choosing Death: Suicide and Calvinism in Early Modern Geneva (Truman State University Press, 2001), The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchatel, 1550-1800 (Cornell University Press, 1992), and articles in journals such as the Archive for Reformation History, Church History, the Journal of Early Modern History, the Journal of Social History, the Journal of Family History, and the Sixteenth Century Journal. He is also the editor of From Sin to Insanity: Suicide in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2004) and The Long Reformation (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and the co-editor (with Isabella M. Watt) of the Registres du Consistoire de Geneve au temps de Calvin, vols. 6-16 (Droz, 2012-21). Watt served as Vice President (2009) and President (2010) of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, a scholarly organization with approximately 1,500 members. He served as Acting Chair of the Department of History for the 2017-18 academic year.

Honors Theses:

Lawrence, Amelia (2021) Beyond Beccaria: Diverse Criticism of the Death Penalty in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries (full text)

Guider, Alison (2015) Freedom of Expression and the Enlightenment. (full text)

Stringer, Morgan L. (2015) A War on Women? The Malleus Maleficarum and the Witch-Hunts in Early Modern Europe. (full text)

Zentner, McLaurine H. (2015) The Black Death and Its Impact on the Church and Popular Religion. (full text)