Dr. S. Austin Collins

Austin Collins is a historian of early modern France and Europe who specializes in urban, religious, peace-making, globalization, and spatial approaches. His research investigates how monarchical and religious influence interacted with civic authority within urban spaces and New World settlements during the early French Wars of Religion of the sixteenth century.

He is Adjunct Professor in History at Gardner-Webb University, Lenoir-Rhyne University, and Belmont Abbey College, three small liberal arts universities in North Carolina. Before returning to the USA, he held a Teach@Tübingen postdoctoral fellowship at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen where he designed and taught seminars about early modern religious violence and early modern global cities.

He received his PhD in early modern French history from Durham University (UK) and Universität Erfurt (Germany) in 2023. At Erfurt he held a one-year doctoral fellowship in the Max-Weber-Kolleg research group ‘Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations’.

His book project, Cities and the Crown during the Royal Tour of France (1564–1566): Civic, Urban, and Spatial Interactions during the Early Religious Wars, explores how royal, civic, and religious actors utilized the urban spaces of Angoulême, Lyon, and Sens to project their own authority and promote religious toleration and coexistence through royal entrances amid religious warfare.