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Joel Iliff, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, History757.352.4780

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 daughters. 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

  • Sustaining the Truth of the Bible’: Black Evangelical Abolitionism and the Transatlantic Politics of Orthodoxy,” Journal of the Civil War Era (June 2021).

Affiliations

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

Awards

  • Dorothy Ross Prize, Society for U.S. Intellectual History, 2022
  • Travel Grant, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), 2018
  • Harriett Jackson Ely Prize, Yale University, 2014
  • Stipendium, Baden-Württemberg Foundation, 2014