Stephanie McCurry

Professor of History
Undergraduate Curriculum Chair

Stephanie McCurry was educated in Ireland and Canada as well as the United States. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton and works on the history of nineteenth century America, the American South and the Civil War, and the history of women and gender. She is the author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford University Press, 1995) which received numerous awards including the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Charles Sydnor Award of the Southern Historical Association. She is also the author of articles and review essays that have appeared in the Journal of American History, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and The Women's Review of Books, as well as in anthologies, including Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1992).

McCurry has been on the faculties of the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, and Princeton University, and has taught a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in American, Southern, and women's history and the comparative history of slave emancipation. She served as Director of the California History Project (a K-12 initiative) from 1996-1998, Director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University from 2002-2003, and (with David Blight) co-chaired the program committee of the Organization of American Historians in 2003. She has held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer.

McCurry is currently finishing a new book, Confederate Crucible: The Political Transformation of the Civil War South, which will be published by Harvard University Press. Two essays, "War, Gender and Emancipation in the Civil War South," and "Women Numerous and Armed: Gender and the Politics of Subsistence in the Civil War South," are now in press.