Nineteenth Century U.S. History
History of the American South
Slavery and Emancipation
Civil War and Reconstruction
Stephanie McCurry is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University. She specializes in the history of the nineteenth century United States, the American South, slavery and emancipation, the Civil War and Reconstruction, women and gender, and comparative histories of postwar societies and reconstructions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of three books: Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Farmers, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Lowcountry (Oxford 1995); Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard 2010) which won the Frederick Douglass book prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); and Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (Harvard 2019).
Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, The TLS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Irish Times. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship (2003) and in 2023-2024 was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. Her most recent publications are "Ku Klux Klan Violence and the Problem of Evidence," Law and History Review / Volume 43 / Issue 2 / May 2025 and "Archives of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones," (co-authored with Rosemary Byrne and Jane Ohlmeyer) Law and History Review / Volume 43 / Issue 2 / May 2025.
McCurry is currently writing a book on Reconstruction in the United States that identifies the intimate as a domain of power that reframes the scale and challenge of the era. It is under contract with Simon and Schuster. She is also collaborating with Professors Kellen Funk, Columbia law School and Sarah Seo, New York University Law School on a project collecting and analyzing data on race and criminal justice in local courts in the southern states in the critical period of
Reconstruction (1865-1876).