Carol E. Harrison

Carol Elizabeth Harrison is an American historian who has written on the history of France and the Catholic Church, including the books The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France (1999) and Romantic Catholics (2014). A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she has worked as a history professor at Auburn University, Kent State University, and the University of South Carolina.

Biography

Carol Elizabeth Harrison,^[1] a native of Baton Rouge,^[2] was born to Kay and Doug Harrison.^[3] She attended Baton Rouge Magnet High School, where she was a state French club quiz bee champion.^[4][5] She later studied at Louisiana State University, obtaining her BA in 1990.^[6] In 1989, she was elected Louisiana's 1990 Rhodes Scholar, as well as LSU's first woman Rhodes Scholar.^[7][2]

Now a Rhodes Scholar, Harrison obtained her PhD at the University of Oxford in 1993;^[6] her doctoral dissertation was titled The esprit d'association and the French bourgeoisie: voluntary societies in eastern France, 1830-1870.^[8] The same year, she became an assistant professor in history at Auburn University, and in 1997 she moved to Kent State University with that same title.^[6] After being promoted to associate professor in 2001, she moved to the University of South Carolina in 2002 and was promoted to professor in 2013.^[6]

Harrison authored the books The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France (1999) and Romantic Catholics (2014), and she has also written several scholarly journal articles on the history of France and Catholic Church.^[6] In 2009, she and Ann Johnson co-edited the volume National Identity: The Role of Science and Technology, adapted from an Osiris special issue named Science and National Identity.^[9][10] She served as a co-editor of the journals Proceedings of the Western Society for French History from 2004 to 2007 and French Historical Studies from 2014 to 2018.^[6] In 2014, she wrote a New York Times Opinionator article on the Édouard René de Laboulaye novel Paris in America.^[11]

In 2024, Harrison was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Religion^[12] and a Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies,^[13] both of which will fund research for A Women’s History of Vatican I, her book on the First Vatican Council.^[14]

Harrison married Tom Brown while working on Romantic Catholics.^[3] John Beall Jr, who was the first Spirit Rider at Oklahoma State University, was his first cousin once removed on her mother's side.^[15][16]