Ian Andrew Isherwood
Assistant Professor
Interdisciplinary Studies
Contact
Address
Room 205
300 North Washington St.
Gettysburg, PA 17325-1400
Education
BA Gettysburg College, 2000
MA Dartmouth College, 2006
PhD University of Glasgow, 2012
Academic Focus
History of War, Memory Studies, Cultural History, British History
Dr. Isherwood is Assistant Professor of War and Memory Studies and Director of the First-Year Seminar Program at Gettysburg College. He is a graduate of Gettysburg College, Dartmouth College, and the University of Glasgow, the latter where he did his Ph.D at the Scottish Centre for War Studies. He specializes in modern British history and the history of war.
Isherwood is the author of the book Remembering the Great War (Bloomsbury 2017), which is a book about war books. His scholarly articles and book reviews have appeared in War and Society, First World War Studies, War, Literature and the Arts, The Journal of Military History, and War in History. He currently is working on two books that are under contract. The first, Life and Death on the Western Front, is an intimate history of a volunteer battalion (8/Queen’s) in the Great War. The second is a book on the politics of war memory and commemoration in American history. Isherwood is a member of the International Society for First World War Studies and The Society for Military History. In 2018, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS) for his contribution to historical scholarship.
Isherwood has a keen interest in digital humanities/online publishing. He is the project creator and co-lead of The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs, a centennial First World War digital history project. Through this project he has taken students to France and Belgium twice for field research on First World War battlefields. He was also the creator and editor-in-chief of The Gettysburg Compiler from 2012 to 2016.
Isherwood has been teaching undergraduates at Gettysburg College for a decade. He places particular emphasis in the classroom on interdisciplinary approaches, especially when examining the subject of war. He is a believer in the value of student/faculty research and he has supervised numerous independent studies as well as four Mellon/Kolbe summer scholars. He is also committed to experiential education and has led three backpacking trips to Scotland through the GRAB program. In 2019, he was honored to be recognized as the outstanding faculty mentor of undergraduate research in the humanities.
On campus, Isherwood is the faculty advisor for Tri Sigma, The Gettysburg History Club, The Civil War Club, The Pennsylvania College Guard, The Gettysburg College Journal of the Civil War Era, and is the house mentor for the the Civil War Era Studies House. If not in his office, he can be found walking his dog, Bertie, on campus.
Courses Taught
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Article British Publishing and Commercial Memories of the First World War in War in History, Vol. 23:3 (2016)
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Article Gettysburg and the Great War in War and Society, Vol. 36:3 (2017)
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Article Writing the ‘ill-managed nursery’: British POW memoirs of the First World War in First World War Studies, Vol. 5:3 (2014)
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Article “To fly is more fascinating than to read about flying”: British R.F.C. Memoirs of the First World War, 1918-1939 in War, Literature & the Arts, Vol. 26 (2014)
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Chapter British Memoirs and Memoirists of the First World War in Philip Dwyer, ed., War Stories: The War Memoir in History and Literature (Oxford: Berghahn, 2016)
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Article When the Hurlyburly's Done / When the Battle's Lost and Won Service, Suffering, and Survival of Civil War and Great War Veterans in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 9:1 (2019)
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Article Battle of Loos in Oxford Bibliographies in Military History. Ed. Dennis Showalter (NY: OUP, 2020)
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Chapter Memoirs: Negotiating the War’s Social Memory (forthcoming) A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War. Eds. Dayton and Van Wienen