March 21, 2008

Stephanie McCurry is Merriam Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in nineteenth-century American women’s and gender history, as well as southern history and political history. Professor McCurry’s first book, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, received five awards, including the Francis Butler Simkins Award for the Best First Book in Southern History, 1995-96, the Charles S. Sydnor Award for 1996, and the John Hope Franklin Prize for the Best Book in American Studies, 1995. She is currently working on a second book, under contract with Harvard University Press, entitled The Brothers’ War: The Body Politic in Civil War South, which explores Southern political culture and gender during the Civil War. Her forthcoming article, “War and Emancipation: The Confederacy in Comparative Perspective,” investigates the effect of the Confederate decision to enlist slave men in the War.

February 22, 2008

Catherine Clinton is a professor at Queen’s University in Belfast, having previously taught at Union College, Brandeis University and at Harvard University. Professor Clinton maintains strong research interest in US history, with specialization in women’s history, southern history, African-American history and the American Civil War. Her current projects include a biography of Mary Lincoln, an introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Mary Chesnut’s Diary, an essay comparing the narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, “Sceptre and Masque,” a study of Mardi Gras rituals in contemporary New Orleans, and a collaborative project on the sexual dynamics of slavery. Among her many books, she is the editor of Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War ( New York, 2006), Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: An African-American Woman’s Civil War memoir ( Athens, Ga., 2006) and the author of ‘Why I Write’ in Why we write ( New York, 2005). Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom ( New York, 2004).

February 1, 2008

William A. Blair is Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University, where he is also the Director of the Civil War Era Institute and editor of Civil War History. He won the 1996 Allan Nevins Prize (given by the American Society of Historians for the best American History dissertation) and served as the co-editor of A Politician Goes to War: The Civil War Letters of John White Geary (1995). His research interests include the Civil War and Reconstruction, the home front, civilians in war, U. S. South, and commemorations of war. Professor Blair has written Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861 – 1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).