Bio

Professor Clinton is a pioneering historian of American women, the American South and the Civil War.  In 2020 she won the UTSA President’s Achievement Award in Research.

 

She is the author or editor of over 30 books. Her first monograph,  The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South was published by Pantheon in 1982 and was a History Book Club selection. She is also the sole author of The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (1984, 1999), Tara Revisited: Women, War and the Plantation Legend (1995) , Civil War Stories  (1999) Public Women and the Confederacy (1999) and the co-author of Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century (1999).

She is a founding member of the Biography International Organization and has published three acclaimed biographies: Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars (2000), Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (2004), and  Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (2008). She is the editor, most recently, of Sisterly Networks: Fifty Years of Southern Women’s Histories (2020).

 

She is the co-editor of the University of Georgia Series: HISTORY IN THE HEADLINES.  She edited the first volume, when it launched in 2019: Confederate Statues and Memorialization. Her co-editor of the series, Jim Downs, edited the second volume in the series: Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections (2020). Two volumes are forthcoming in 2023: January 6th and Roe V. Wade: Fifty Years Later.

 

She is an award-winning author for books for young readers, including I, Too, Sing America: Three Centuries of African American Poetry (1998) [Banks Street Poetry Prize], The Black Soldier (2000), A Poem of Her Own: Women’s Voices Past and Present (2003),  and Hold the Flag High (2005).

 

She earned a B.A. from Harvard, her M.A. from the University of Sussex, and her Ph.D. from Princeton. She has taught previously at Harvard University, Wesleyan University and Brown University.  She has held visiting chairs at the City University of New York (Baruch College), the University of Richmond and Wofford College. She is an emerita professor at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she taught from 2006-2014.

 

She served as a consultant for Bennett Singer’s Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (2002),  Maria Agui Carter’s Rebel! (2013)  & Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012).

 

She has been elected to the Society of American Historians (1988-) and the UTSA Academy of Distinguished Researchers.  She has been a lecturer for the Gilder Lehrman Institute and served on several prize committees, including the Frederick Douglass Prize and the Lincoln Prize.

She has served on numerous prize committees, including both the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in History, and for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. She has been a juror for the National Book Award.

 

She is on the editorial boards of Civil War History and  Civil War Times.  She has served as a study leader for Smithsonian Journeys (2003-2006).

 

She was elected President of the Southern Historical Association in 2016, the same year that she won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Clinton’s presidential address (Clinton, Catherine. "The Southern Social Network." Journal of Southern History 83, no. 1 (2017): 7-36. doi:10.1353/soh.2017.0000)  was the basis for the Cassandra Project, a website to promote awareness of sexual harassment within the academy.

 

Louisiana State University published her Fleming Lectures in 2016: Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the Civil War.

 

In 2021 she was elected to the Texas Institute of Letters. She is currently on scholarly advisory  boards at the Museum of the Troubles and Peace (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Ford’s Theatre (Washington, D.C.), The Lincoln Forum (Gettysburg Pa.) ,  and The Alamo (San Antonio, Texas).

 

WEBSITE: http://WWW.CATHERINECLINTON.COM