SEA Featured Scholar, November 2026: Jan Stievermann
How did you become interested in studying early American literature/culture?
I guess there is a dual point of origin, one for the historian, the other for the literary scholar. As an exchange student at Trinity College, Dublin, I took an outstanding history class on the English Civil War period, in which I was first introduced to the Puritans. Their strangeness and radical intensity immediately grabbed my attention and still holds it. As a student of English and American literature at the University of Tübingen I was initiated into the fascinating world of Transcendentalism and the so-called American Renaissance by the later adviser of my doctoral thesis on Emerson.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
To be honest, many of the writings I have spent a lot of time with after my dissertation are aesthetically not very appealing. I worked a lot on Cotton Mather and German Pietists, among other things. What can I say? Their texts are extremely interesting to me as a scholar but not necessarily great literature, judged according to our modern sensibilities. Aesthetically, but also in terms of the existential and religious questions they are grappling with, my favorite texts are all post 1830s. I have an enduring love for some of the great Romantic authors such as Emerson or Dickinson but also enjoy the American Gothic tradition, as well as African American literature.
What are you currently working on?
I’m working on two things mostly. The first is Volume 7 of our ongoing critical edition of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana (1693-1728), the earliest comprehensive Bible commentary to come out of British North America. This section of the manuscript contains Mather’s extensive and very rich annotations on the first three gospels. The other project is a book on the former slave turned Reformed minister and abolitionist James W.C. Pennington (1808[?]-1870), in which I’m hoping to combine a biography of this seriously understudied figure with deeper explorations of the many stories he was involved with, including that of the early Black church, the evangelical wing of the anti-slavery movement, the rise of the African American press, and much more.
What is something you are reading right now (early American or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
Over the last three years I have been deeply immersed in Pennington’s writings, as I was preparing a critical anthology (now out from Oxford University Press). I find Pennington rhetorically very powerful, a true master of the Black Jeremiad and the African American prophetic tradition. Even as he speaks about the great evils he personally had to face and unrelentingly calls out the hardened sins of the nation, he still finds (in the idiom of the Bible) a “hope against hope.” I find that very moving and encouraging.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
I have always been inspired by scholars who have worked on recovering and re-assessing overlooked or misunderstood historical figures, also by bringing their writings back into the conversation through good historical editions. A great recent example for that would be The Writings of Daniel Gookin and Allied Documents (2026), edited by Adrian C. Weimer and David D. Hall.
Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in the United States at Heidelberg University, Germany.