Kyra Sanchez Clapper

I am an Assistant Professor of History at Bethel University, where I also coordinate the history program. I finished my PhD in History at the University of Memphis in 2021, with a major field in France and Germany and minor fields in French cultural studies and in Native Americans, imperialism, and the environment.

My research follows plants and the people who moved them. My dissertation, Les jardins exotiques, traced how early French Romanticism shaped nineteenth-century French gardens built around travel and collecting. I am now building Botanophilia Correspondences during the Revolutionary Era, a database of eighteenth and nineteenth century plant collectors and the letters they sent each other.

I teach French language alongside courses on the French Revolution, the Age of Napoleon, Caribbean history, and twentieth-century Europe. I have co-led a study abroad program in Paris and will lead a Maymester in France in 2027.

I review for the Journal of Ecohumanism, manage digital media for the board of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and read AP World History for Educational Testing Service.