Ian Andrew Isherwood
Associate 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
Note: Dr. Isherwood is on sabbatical during the fall semester 2023.
Ian Isherwood is Associate Professor of War and Memory Studies at Gettysburg College. He is a historian of war; most of his scholarly work considers the experience of war and representation in era of the two world wars. Having taught at a college on a famous battlefield for the past thirteen years, Isherwood is also interested in the American Civil War and the connections between that conflict and broader concepts of historical memory in America.
Isherwood is the author of Remembering the Great War (Bloomsbury, 2017/Paperback 2020), co-editor of Serpents of War (Kansas, 2023) with Steve Trout, and is finishing a book entitled The Battalion: Life and Death on the Western Front. He has also written numerous journal articles and reviews. He is currently working on a book under contract concerning the politics of commemoration from the Civil War to the Global War on Terror tentatively entitled Remembering America’s Wars.
Isherwood is a graduate of Gettysburg College, Dartmouth College, and the University of Glasgow, the latter where he did his PhD in history at the Scottish Centre for War Studies. He is a fellow of the International Society for First World War Studies, a member of the Society for Military History, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). During academic year 2022-2023, Isherwood was honored to serve as the Harold K. Johnson Chair of Military History at the United States Army War College. In 2023, he was a summer fellow-in-residence at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford.
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 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.
If not in his office in Weidensall, Isherwood 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 A History of American Literature and Culture of the First World War. Eds. Dayton & Van Wienen (2021)
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Book Serpents of War
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Article A Year of Living Strategically 1 War Room: The U.S. Army War College
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Article A Year of Living Strategically 2 War Room: The U.S. Army War College