Stephanie McCurry Elected to Society of American Historians

Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History Stephanie McCurry has been elected to the Society of American Historians, one of the highest honors in the field. The Society is open to both academic historians and professional writers of American history. Membership, by invitation only, is limited to 250 authors and 14 publishers. Their selection is based on a demonstrated commitment to the concept of literary distinction in the writing and publishing of history and biography.

McCurry is a specialist in 19th century American history, with a focus on the American South and the Civil War era, and the history of women and gender. Her latest book, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, was published in 2010. She is also the author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country, 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. McCurry has written 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, and, most recently, the essay “War, Gender, and Emancipation in the Civil War South,” published in Lincoln's Proclamation: Race, Place and the Paradoxes of Emancipation, edited by William Blair and Karen Younger.

Since 2005 McCurry has been an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. Over the years she has held a number of fellowships, from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently undergraduate chair in the history department at Penn.