Dr. Parker is Professor of history at Saint Louis University. Parker’s new research focuses on conflicts over space, including sacred space, in early modern missionary encounters. Parker’s talk will focus on his work examining the expansion of Christianity and Islam into new lands in the early modern period. Parker argues these expansions transformed expressions of religious belief and observance throughout many parts of the world. These Abrahamic traditions also collided with Indigenous mythologies that were rooted in the landscape. Consequently, Islam and Christianity labored to transform sacred sites and their narratives as part of campaigns of conversion. They also introduced new relationships to the land that affected a range of issues, like labor, gender norms. Parker’s research suggests that missionary encounters not only affected the sites and people of conversion, but also wrought important changes within Islam and Christianity.

Over his career, Dr. Parker’s research has focused primarily on the complex ways that individuals and communities in early modern Europe experienced and appropriated religious belief. His focus most recently has sought to uncover the global entanglements that reshaped all regions of the world. As part of that aim, he is now working on several projects that seek to uncover the influence of physical and cultural space on knowledge production and religious encounters. This research agenda is reflected in Dr. Parker’s most recent book, Global Calvinism: Conversion and Commerce in the Dutch Empire, 1600-1800 (2022), which focuses on Dutch Calvinism’s commitment to overseas missions and entanglements with commercial empire. As well, his previous book project, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) offers a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary introduction to cross-cultural encounters in the early modern age (1400–1800) and their influences on the development of world societies. Recently, Dr. Parker was also the recipient of a Huntington Library fellowship and recognized as a Felix M. Gilbert Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.