Stephanie D. Kermes

Stephanie D. Kermes

Assistant Professor of Social Science
MA (early modern & modern European history), Ludwig Maximilian, Germany; PhD (colonial & early national American history), Boston College
skermes@bu.edu

Stephanie Kermes is Assistant Professor of Social Science at Boston University’s College of General Studies.

She earned an MA (1998) in early modern and modern history from the University of Munich in Germany and a PhD (2003) in history from Boston College. Before coming to CGS, Professor Kermes taught courses in American civilization and European history in an Atlantic context at Boston College, where she received the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award in 2003. She also taught a course in women’s history at Wheaton College.

Professor Kermes specializes in early American history; her minor fields are 19th- and 20th-century American social and cultural history as well as the history of Tudor and Stuart England. Her broad academic training in Europe and the United States evoked a strong interest in trans-Atlantic history. The John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University and the Huntington Library supported her dissertation with fellowships. In the summer of 2005, Professor Kermes received the women’s history fellowship from the Bostonian Society to research the education of Boston girls in the early 19th century.

In her book Creating an American Identity: New England, 1789–1825 (forthcoming in summer 2008, by Palgrave MacMillan) Professor Kermes examines the relationship between regionalism and nationalism in early republican New England. Focusing on the years from 1789 to 1825, the study analyzes the process by which New Englanders used trans-Atlantic symbols as well as regional landscapes, values, and personality characteristics to create a New England national identity. New Englanders’ insistence that their self-made regional identity was the only acceptable American identity profoundly shaped their vision of the United States.

Professor Kermes is currently working on a new book project on the education of Massachusetts girls in the 19th century.

“Massachusetts—The Kindergarten in the North-End Industrial Home, Boston. From a Sketch by Chas. Upham.” Fig. 3.7 Frank Leslie’s Magazine. Massachusetts: The Kindergarten in the North End Industrial Home, Boston. June 4, 1881, Page 229 **PerL

You may wish to read one of her articles online:

“’I Wish for Nothing More Ardent upon Earth, than to See My Friends and Country Again’: The Return of Massachusetts Loyalists.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 2002 30(1): 30–49. Issn: 0276-8313