Layla Koch

Throughout her MA in Christianity and Culture and BA in American Studies at the University of Heidelberg, Layla Koch spent two years abroad at Yale and Uppsala University and received funding from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation and German Fulbright Committee. 

“The Grand Instrument to Convert the World”: Child(hood) in the Early US Foreign Mission Movement, 1810-1865

The dissertation project examines how the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the earliest US foreign mission organization, employed discursive constructs and the charismatic authority of childhood in its publications and fundraisers to a US audience from its founding in 1810 to 1865. By disentangling Protestant discourses about childhood and religious agency, it argues that the rise of sentimental childhood, strategies of infantilization, and the early children’s consumer culture were all key to the immense popularity of foreign missions among Early Republican Americans. It thus seeks to contribute to overlooked and early aspects of the history of US nation-building, childhood, missions, and consumer culture throughout the nineteenth century.