Professional Profile

 

 

Gerald L. Soliday has recently retired as an Associate Professor of Historical Studies and the History of Ideas in the School of Arts and Humanities, a position he has held since 1976.  He took B.A. and M.A. degrees in history from the Ohio State University (1961 and 1963) and a Ph.D. in European history from Harvard University (1969).  Soliday has been a Killam Visiting Fellow at Dalhousie University (1967-68), Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University (1968-76), and Visiting Lecturer on Early Modern European History at Harvard University (1987-88).  His teaching and research center on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe (1450 -1800), with special research interests in urban social structures and broad teaching responsibilities in European society and culture, the social history of literature and the arts, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to the arts and humanities.

 

Professor Soliday has published A Community in Conflict:  Frankfurt Society in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (University Press of New England, 1974) and edited The History of Kinship and the Family:  A Select International Bibliography (Kraus International Publishers, 1980).  In addition, he has published six articles, two review essays, and some sixty book reviews in professional journals.  For many years he has engaged in research for a social history of Marburg, Germany, from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century.  Financial support for the project  has come from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Germany (1972-74 and the summers of 1978 and 1980), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1985 and 1986), and a Special Faculty Development Assignment from UT-Dallas (1999-2000). 

 

Now that he is retired and teaching only individual students or an occasional graduate course as an emeritus professor, Dr. Soliday is focusing his work on a monograph and an edition of primary sources that use the Hessian city as a case study to elucidate a wide variety of interpretive issues in the social, political, and cultural history of early modern Europe.

 

Gerald Soliday has served on the program committee of the German Studies Association (1981, 82, and 83) and on the national screening committee for German study grants of the Institute for International Education (1990, 91, and 92).  He was coordinator of the Dallas Social History Group (1989-1993), and in 1983 he was elected a Scholarly Member of the Hessian Historical Commission.  In 1998 he was president of the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association.