History

Jim Downs

Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History

Civil War Era Studies

Contact

Box

Campus Box 0401

Address

Weidensall Hall
Room 202
300 North Washington St.
Gettysburg, PA 17325-1400

Education

PhD Columbia University, 2005
MA Columbia University, 2001
BA University of Pennsylvania, 1995
Other Harvard University, 2016

Academic Focus

Civil War Era Studies, History of Medicine and Public Health, African-American Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History. He is the author of Sick From Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford UP, 2012), Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016) and Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Harvard UP, 2021) which has been translated into Chinese, French, Korean, Japanese, and Russian.

He has edited four anthologies, including Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation, coedited with David Blight (University of Georgia Press, 2017) and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2016) coedited with Jennifer Brier and Jennifer Morgan.

Downs is the co-series editor with Catherine Clinton of History in the Headlines, at the University of Georgia Press, and recently published Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections, which grew out of a conversation he moderated with Stacey Abrams, Carol Anderson, Kevin M. Kruse, Heather Cox Richardson and Heather Ann Thompson.

He has published articles and essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Slate, Vice, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education,  The L.A. Review of Books, among others. Downs has published book chapters in number of edited volumes, most recently in Remembering the Memphis Massacre: An American Story (UGA Press, 2020).

Downs is Editor of Civil War History. He was awarded the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American History at Harvard University in 2022-23. He has recently been elected to the Society of American Historians, The Royal Historical Society in the United Kingdom, and the Executive Council for the Southern Historical Association. In 2022, he received a NEH grant to direct a summer institute, Civil War Archives: A New Social and Culture History, for faculty in higher education.

In 2015-16, Downs was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship that allowed him to return to graduate school where he gained postgraduate training in medical anthropology at Harvard University. He earned his PhD in History at Columbia University, his MA in American Studies also at Columbia University, and his BA in American Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. The Organization of American Historians named him a Distinguished Lecturer in 2014-17, which was then renewed in 2017 and again in 2020 and 2023.

 

Courses Taught