R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History

Member, Committee on Global Thought

Stephanie McCurry is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Columbia University. She specializes in American, Southern, and Women’s History, with a particular focus on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

McCurry was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She earned her M.A. from the University of Rochester and her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Before joining Columbia, she held faculty positions at the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a visiting professor at Princeton University in 2006-2007.

Beyond her academic appointments, McCurry has held several leadership roles. She served as Director of the California History Project (1996-1998), Director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University (2002-2003), and co-chaired the program committee of the Organization of American Historians (2003). Since 2005, she has been an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

She is the author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford University Press, 1995), Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press, 2010), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, and Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2019). Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Women’s Review of Books.

At Columbia, McCurry teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on U.S. history, including the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

Degrees:

  • Ph.D., State University of New York at Binghamton
  • M.A., University of Rochester
  • B.A., University of Western Ontario

Website:

https://www.stephaniemccurry.com/about