Email: nytroe@bc.edu
Education:
Northwestern College (BA in History and Writing and Rhetoric)
Research Interests:
My dissertation focuses on the identity creation of different religious communities between 1890 and 1920, as prompted by the common stimuli of modernity, including the processes of industrialization, secularization, and modernization, and unique internal challenges. Religious communities created both historical and religious identity through deliberate attempts to look to the past via ecclesiastical and lay memory. Active recollection of the past through commemorative practices and public ceremonies provided religious communities with the time and the space to construct memories to demonstrate the historicity of their faith, sustain their religious communities within the experience of modernity, demonstrate their historical legitimacy and identity, and make sense of the present moment through. Commemorative practices and public ceremonies were conducted in a manner that mandated careful selection of narrative elements most enabling the religious community to assert its historical legitimacy not only within the community, but outwardly to American society at large.
Faculty Advisor: