Biographical Statement

Dr. Noll was born July 18, 1946 in Iowa City, Iowa. His education includes a B.A. at Wheaton College (English) in 1968, M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1970, M.A. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1972, and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University (History of Christianity) in 1974.

His career as an educator includes being an assistant professor of history at Trinity College (Deerfield, IL) from 1975-78, associate professor of history at Wheaton College from 1978-84, professor of history at Wheaton College from 1984-2006. From Fall of 2006 to 2016, Noll was the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History in Department of History at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, replacing George Marsden. He retired in 2016.

While on the Wheaton College faculty he served as the McManis Chair of Christian Thought and is the co-founder and former director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. In recent years Dr. Noll has been a visiting teacher at Harvard Divinity School, University of Chicago Divinity School, Westminster Theological Seminary, and Regent College of Vancouver, B.C.

As a historian he has focused on Christianity in North America. He has written or edited over two dozen books which include those such as Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholarship, and the Bible in America (1986), A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (1992), and the American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (2000). He is most known for The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a book about anti-intellectual tendencies within the American evangelical movement, which was widely covered in both religious and secular publications.

His research interests include: Theology, politics, society from the Great Awakening to the Civil War, Intellectual history of Protestantism, Cultural history of the Bible, and Evangelicalism in the North Atlantic Region. In 2005 was named by Time Magazine as one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America.He was awarded a National Humanities Medal in the Oval Office by President George W. Bush in 2006.

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