Bruce Janacek

My teaching and research emphasis is in early modern European history, the period historians use to describe the period ca. 1350-1789 when events and discoveries were gradually beginning to transform Western civilization into what would become known as "modern."  Courses I teach might include readings and discussions on the Black Death, the Italian Renaissance, European contact with the New World, the Reformation and the attendant Wars of Religion in France and the Holy Roman Empire, the Scientific Revolution, the "Crises of the Seventeenth Century" that include among other things, the Thirty Years War, the English Civil Wars and the "witch-craze," and finally, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.  I also teach the earlier periods of Western civilization, beginning with the ancient Near East and going up to and including medieval Christendom.  Finally, I am privileged to teach a seminar in the Leadership, Ethics and Values program titled, "Shakespeare and His World," a course that studies how Shakespeare's plays are as relevant to Ameicans in the twenty-first century as they were to sixteenth-century Elizabethans.