Duke Divinity School will sponsor the 2016 David C. and Virginia Steinmetz lecture Sept. 8 featuring guest lecturer Mark Valeri, Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. The lecture is free and open to Duke Divinity School students, faculty, and staff.

Valeri will lecture on "How Calvinists First Encountered Religions in the New World: Huguenots in Brazil and Florida,” from 10 to 11:15 a.m. in 0016 Westbrook. He specializes in religion and social thought, especially economics, in America; Reformation theology and the political history of Calvinism; Puritanism; and enlightenment moral philosophy. He is currently researching religious persuasion, evangelicalism, and secularism in the eighteenth century.

Prior to Washington University, Valeri served as the Ernest Trice Thompson Professor of Church History at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Va. His prior appointment was in the Religious Studies department at Lewis and Clark College.

Valeri has received several fellowships, including an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies grant, and a Lilly Endowment faculty fellowship. Valeri earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University, an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School, and a B.A. from Whitworth College.

His latest book, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America, (Princeton University Press, 2010), received the 2011 Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society of Church History. It was also shortlisted for the 2011 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion and selected as one of Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010.

His previous publications include Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy’s New England: The Origins of the New Divinity in Revolutionary America (Oxford University Press, 1994), which won the Mackemie Prize from the Presbyterian Historical Society; The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 17: Sermons and Discourses, 1730-1733 (Yale University Press, 1999); Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), co-edited with Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp and Leigh E. Schmidt; and the co-edited Global Neighbors: Christian Faith and Moral Obligation in Today’s Economy (Eerdmans, 2008).