Jeffrey Burton Russell

Jeffrey Burton Russell (born 1934) is a well published American historian and religious studies scholar.

Biography

Russell received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1955 and his PhD from Emory University in 1960. He is currently Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has also taught History and Religious Studies at Berkeley, Riverside, Harvard, New Mexico, and Notre Dame.

Works

Russell has published widely, mostly in medieval European history and the history of theology. His first book was Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (1965). He is most noted for his five-volume history of the concept of the Devil: The Devil (1977), Satan (1981), Lucifer (1984), Mephistopheles (1986) and The Prince of Darkness (1988).

In Inventing the Flat Earth (1991) he argues that 19th century anti-Christians invented and spread the falsehood that educated people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat. As one writer summarizes, "Russell also examined a large selection of textbooks and found those written before 1870 usually included the correct account, but most textbooks written after 1880 uncritically repeated the erroneous claims in Washington Irving, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Russell concludes that Irving, Draper and White were the main writers responsible for introducing the erroneous flat-earth myth that is still with us today."

Russell has also written two books on the history of the notion of Heaven: A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (1997), which deals with the period from around 200 B.C. up to Dante, and Paradise Mislaid (2006), which takes the story up to the present day.

Honors and accolades

• Fulbright Fellow
• Harvard Junior Fellow
• Guggenheim Fellow