Dominic Erdozain
Research Fellow
Degrees
PhD, University of Cambridge, 2003
MPhil, University of Cambridge, 1999
BA, University of Oxford, 1997
Dr. Dominic Erdozain studied modern history at Oxford University and earned his MPhil and PhD at Cambridge. He lectured at King’s College London for several years before moving to Atlanta, where he is currently researching the history and culture of firearms in the United States. His most recent book, One Nation Under Guns, explores the relationship between republican constitutionalism and American gun culture. His current project is a study of the influence of Christian theology on gun rights and the military tradition, provisionally titled Arming Jesus: God and Guns in America.
Erdozain’s previous books include The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx, and The Dangerous God: Christianity and the Soviet Experiment, an edited volume on religious dissent in the USSR. Both of these projects deepened his interest in the intellectual origins of democracy, and his passion to recover the humanism and reverence for life that is central to it. Trained to study the past “for its own sake,” Erdozain is strongly committed to bringing history to bear on contemporary debates—from gun rights to professional sport.
BOOKS
One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts our History and Threatens our Democracy, Crown, 2024
The Dangerous God: Christianity and the Soviet Experiment, NIUP, 2017
The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx, Oxford University Press, 2015
The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion, Boydell & Brewer, 2010
CHAPTERS AND ARTICLES
“What the Supreme Court Keeps Getting Wrong About the Meaning of a ‘Well Regulated Militia,’” in TIME, November 07, 2023
“If Men Were Angels: Reason and Passion in the Enlightenment,” in Anna Tomaszwekska and Hasse Hamalainen, eds., Between Secularization and Reform: Religion in the Enlightenment, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Volume 340 (Leiden: Brill, 2022)
“The Church of America and the Heresy of Peace.” Studies in Church History 57 (June 2021): 364–85.
“Jesus and Augustine: The God of Terror and the Origins of European Doubt.” Journal of Religious History 41, no. 4 (December 2017): 476–504.
“A Heavenly Poise: Radical Religion and the Making of the Enlightenment.” Intellectual History Review 27, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 71–96.
“‘Cause is not quite what it used to be’: the Return of Secularisation.” English Historical Review, Volume CXXVII no. 525, (2012), 377-400.
“The Secularisation of Sin in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 62, no. 1 (2011): 59-88.
“Karl Marx and the Invention of the Secular.” In Joshua King ed., The Uses of Religion in Nineteenth-Century Studies. Ohio State University Press, 2019.
