Kenneth L. Draper
Professor
Department of History
Ambrose University
Canada
Biography
My writing and research has focused on understanding the place of religion in late 19th- and early 20th-century Canada. This is a period which has been characterized as both a period of religious doubt and decline and a period of religious revival and growth. What seems to be happening is a reorientation of the place of religion from a vector of public identity to that of individual and private self-identity. Thus, in public, religious discourse becomes muted, while lay-led movements and practices develop wide followings that move outside of historic denominational boundaries. This leads to a more individualized, privatized experience of religion. My current interests are in exploring Michel Foucault's thinking on the subject, especially in reference to governmentality and technologies of the self, as an approach to the intersection of evangelical Christianity and the development of Canada as a liberal state in the 20th century.
Research Interest
History
Publications
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"Redemptive homes - Redeeming Choices: Saving the Social in Late-Victorian London, Ontario," in Nancy Christie, Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760-1969 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill/Queen's University Press, 2002).
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Finishing Badly: Religion, authority and clergy in late-Victorian London, Ontario," in Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert, Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Canada (Montreal/Kingston: McGill/Queen's University Press, 2006)
