Born at the edge of the Colorado Desert, Luke Clossey has studied and taught world history for the last decade, near the San Francisco Bay, the Danube, and the Yellow Sea. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Regents of the University of California, Berkeley, awarded him the doctorate in history in 2004 for his dissertation on early Jesuit networks linking Germany, Mexico, and China. He joined the SFU History Department later that year.

Research Interests

global history, history of religion, history of ideas and emotions

Dr. Clossey's research program seeks to spotlight, and challenge, the modernist and Eurocentric values and assumptions that underlie our common sense today.  Rather than reinforce our current sensibilities, his work argues for the use of history--especially pre-colonial, traditional, Indigenous, and non-Enlightenment histories--as a source of "new" old solutions to contemporary problems. 

“The Unbelieved and Historians” argues for taking spiritual beings seriously as historical actors, while “It's A Small World After All” advances a historical geography that goes beyond the West.  His Jesus and the Making of the Modern Mind book is now available for free download.  He is currently working on projects about academic humour and on contemporary Buddhism’s turning to ancient India to develop “new” old pathways to well-being.

• “Monasticism,” co-authored with Karen Ferguson, for The Oxford Handbook of Buddhism in North America (2024).
• “Western Monastics Flourishing in the Northwest,” co-authored with Karen Fergson, Northwest Dharma Association News (Winter 2024), https://northwestdharma.org/western-monastics-flourishing-in-the-northwest/
• “Buddhism and Globalization,” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World (2022).
• “Birken Buddhist Forest Monastery: Asian Migration, the Creative Class, and Cultural Transformation in the New Pacific British Columbia,” co-authored with Karen Ferguson, BC Studies 208 (2020): 17-44.  Lecture version available on youtube.
• “The Ethical Turn,”  in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, ed. Ken Seigneurie (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2020).
• “Religious Expansion in Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism,” in Global Reformations: Transforming Early Modern Religions, Societies, and Cultures, edited by Nicholas Terpstra (New York: Routledge: 2019), 13-30.
• “Religious Ideas in Motion,” co-authored with Karin Vélez and Sebastian Prange, in Companion to World History, ed. Douglas Northrop (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 352-64.
• Review of Bryan G. Levman, Pāli, the Language: The Medium and Message (Cambridge Scholars,  2020), for the Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies (2023).
• “The Best Books for Making Sense of Religious History,” Shepherd.com (2024).

Writings on Thinking Beyond Eurocentrism

• “The Unbelieved and Historians, Part I: A Challenge,” co-authored with Kyle Jackson, Brandon Marriott, Andrew Redden, and Karin Vélez, History Compass 14 (2016): 594-602.
• “The Unbelieved and Historians, Part II: Proposals and Solutions,” co-authored with Kyle Jackson, Brandon Marriott, Andrew Redden, and Karin Vélez, History Compass 15 (2017): 1-9 of 9.
• “The Unbelieved and Historians, Part III: Responses and Elaborations,” co-authored with Arlen Wiesenthal, History Compass 15 (2017): 6-10 of 10.
• “The Geographies and Methodologies of Religion in the Journal of Early Modern History,” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 545-58.
• “Language, Belief, Knowledge,” in The Cambridge World History, vol. 1, ed. David Christian (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 132-64.
• “It’s a Small World After All: The Wider World in Historians’ Peripheral Vision,” co-authored with Nicholas Guyatt, American Historical Association Perspectives on History 51 (2013).
• “The Wider World in the Peripheral Vision of Historians in Canada,” ActiveHistory.ca (2013).
• “Peripheral Vision: The Authors' Response,” co-authored with Nicholas Guyatt, in “AHA Roundtable: Is the Wider World in Historians’ 'Peripheral Vision'?”  AHA Today: A Blog of the American Historical Association (July 15, 2013).
• “Asia-Centred Approaches to the History of the Early Modern World: A Methodological Romp,” in Comparative Early Modernities: 1100-1800, ed. David Porter (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 73-96.

Writings on Teaching

• “Desanctifying Scholarship Bringing Students into Research and Writing,” co-authored with Kyle Jackson and Isaac Schoeber, AHA Perspectives on History (August 28, 2024).
• “Evaluating without Grading: Encouraging Students to Master Skills with Specifications Grading,” co-authored with Esther Souman, AHA Perspectives on History (September 14, 2021).
• “Integrating Foreign Language Learning into the History Classroom,” co-authored with Vlad Vintila, The History Teacher 52 (2019): 333-55.
• Teaching and Learning Guide for “The Unbelieved and Historians, Parts I and II,” co-authored with Kyle Jackson, History Compass 14 (2017).
• “The Usefulness of Early-Modernity as a Pedagogical Tool,” co-authored wtih Brandon Marriott, History Compass 6 (2008): 1368-81.
• “From the Mission to the Classroom: The Global Perspective and the History of Teaching Religion.” World History Bulletin 23 [Focus Issue on “Religion and World History”] (2007): 18-21.
• “加拿大的世界史及其导论课的意义(摘要) [World History in Canada and its Implications for the Introductory Survey],” 全球史评论 [Global History Review] 1 (2007): 355-59.

Writings on the Early Modern World

• “Relevance of Things Past: Contemporary Applications of Early Modern Studies,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 50 (2019): 141-47.
• “The Global Renaissance,” co-authored with Peter Burke and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Journal of World History 28 (2017): 1-30.
• “Mission,” Oxford Bibliographies Online, Oxford University Press, 2012 [revised 2019].
• “Merchants, Migrants, Missionaries, and Globalization in the Early-Modern Pacific,” Journal of Global History 1.1 (2006): 51-58.  Translated as “近代早期太平洋的商人,移民,傳教士與全球化”  by 王志红 in Global History Review 全球史评论 12 (2017): 127-151.
  
• “Response and Reflection from the Author,” in “A Round Table on Luke Clossey’s Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions: (Winner of the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association, 2010),” Histoire sociale/Social history 45 (2012): 409-12.
•  “Faith in Empire: Religious Sources of Legitimacy for Expansionist Early-Modern States,” in Politics and Reformations: Histories and Reformations: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., ed. Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 127 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 571-87.

Projects

• Small World History http://smallworldhistory.org
• Institut für die Späte Altzeit http://isaz.ca
  

Areas of Graduate Supervision

early-modern religion, ancient and contemporary Buddhism, pedagogy and well-being

Accepting new graduate students: yes

Teaching Interests

World history, history of religion

Awards

Watch Dr. Clossey's video from the "Meet our Professors" Series: