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About Me

Catherine Clinton earned her A.B. from Harvard, her M.A. from the University of Sussex, and her Ph.D. from Princeton. She has taught previously at Harvard, the Citadel, Wesleyan, Brandeis, Baruch College at the City University of New York, and Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she was a professor from 2006-2017, before her current emerita status.

She now holds the Denman Chair in American History at the University of Texas in San Antonio. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.

She has served on the executive council of the Society of American Historians and on the Advisory Committee of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Bicentennial Commission, and remains on advisory boards for Civil War History, Civil War Times, The President’s Cottage and Soldier’s Home and Ford’s Theatre.

Clinton has written and edited over 25 books, from children’s fiction about Phillis Wheatley to the Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century–from booklets for the National Park Service to poetry anthologies. Her new series, HISTORY IN THE HEADLINES, is co-edited by Jim Downs and published by the University of Georgia Press.

Her first book, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South, appeared in 1982 & was as a selection of the History Book Club Her 2004 biography of Harriet Tubman was named as one of the best non-fiction books of 2004 by the Christian Science Monitor and the Chicago Tribune. Mrs. Lincoln: A Life was published by Harper Collins in 2009 and she served as a consultant for Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln.

In 2016 Louisiana State University Press published her Fleming Lectures: Stepdaughters Of History: Southern Women and The Civil War.

In 2016, she served as President of the Southern Historical Association, and delivered a controversial presidential address “The Southern Social Network”: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/647288/summary

Her address has been excerpted by the HISTORY NEWS NETWORK: “he told me that it was inevitable ‘he would have his way with me'”. (https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/168545).

In 2018 she is launching a non-profit initiative to combat sexual harassment in the training of women historians at institutions in the South: The Cassandra Project.

Recent Publications

“A Room of His Own: Lincoln & the Petersen House,” in Civil War Places, ed. by Matt Gallman & Gary Gallagher, University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming.

Writing History with Lightning: Representations of Nineteenth Century America on Film ed. by Matthew Hulbert & John Inscoe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, in press)

“Interview with Catherine Clinton” in David Dean, ed. Companion to Public History (John Wiley, 2018)

Review of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls, Times Higher Education (London), 3 August 2017.

“Donald Trump Inauguration: How academics are spending the day, ”Times Higher Education (London), 19 January 2017.

“Harriet Tubman’s Very Good Year!” HISTORY NEWS NETWORK: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165339

“The Southern Social Network” (SHA Presidential Address), Journal of Southern History Volume 83, Number 1, February 2017, pp. 7-36.

Review: White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg, Times Higher Education (London), 6 October 2016.

“Statues and Status: Lincoln in Europe,” in Lincoln in Europe, ed. By John Dean and Olivier Frayssee, American Studies Journal, No. 60, 2016. http://www.asjournal.org/60-2016/

STEPDAUGHTERS OF HISTORY: SOUTHERN WOMEN AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

(Louisiana State University Press, 2016)Walter J. Fleming Lectures

MRS. LINCOLN: A LIFE (Harper Collins, 2009)

HISTORY BOOK CLUB SELECTION, BOOK OF THE MONTH SELECTION

MARY CHESNUT’S DIARY, editor (Penguin Classic, 2011)

Media Coverage

Social Media

Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

Emancipation, Gender, Sexuality, Slavery, Women