Dr. Jonathan Koefoed

Dr. Koefoed came to Belhaven University in 2016 from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in history at the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas. He received B.A. degrees in History and in Philosophy from Arizona State University, graduating from the Barrett Honors College. He received an M.A. in Historical Theology from Saint Louis University and a Ph.D. in History from Boston University, where his study focused on American history and intellectual history.

Dr. Koefoed is particularly interested in the history of thought and the dynamic relationship between ideas and their historical context. He enjoys teaching at Belhaven, where the curriculum emphasizes the importance of one’s worldview and where education is valued as a process forming the whole person. The small size, historic campus, and personal relationships amongst faculty and students provide a hospitable environment for understanding the relationship between faith and reason.

Dr. Koefoed and his wife have enjoyed living many places, including 12 states and three countries. Former soccer players, they now enjoy running races and seeing the world in a new way through the eyes of their two young daughters.

They live in the historic Belhaven neighborhood along with many other Belhaven faculty, enjoying the architectural diversity and the many wonderful neighbors. They are members of Holy Trinity Anglican Church. Dr. Koefoed supports the English soccer team Arsenal, whose former glory and recent trajectory provide a helpful reminder that life is mutable and that history is indeed the study of change over time.

Dr. Koefoed’s research focuses on transatlantic intellectual history in the nineteenth century. He is particularly interested in the romantic movement and its influence on U.S. thought, culture, and religion.

He has published articles on the U.S. romanticists Washington Allston and James Marsh and their relationship to the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These articles have appeared in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations and in the journal Religions.

He has also contributed to The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook, Vol. 1: To 1877, edited by Joseph L. Locke and Ben Wright and to A Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia, edited by Harry S. Stout, Kenneth Minkema, and Adrian Neele. His book reviews have appeared in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies and American Nineteenth Century History.