Susanna Lee

Bio

Susanna Michele Lee is an associate professor in the History Department at North Carolina State University. She teaches classes on the history of the nineteenth-century United States. She has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Wake Forest University, and Duke University. Her book, Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post-Civil War South, was published with Cambridge University Press. She is currently working on two book manuscripts: one on the US-Dakota War and one on civilians in central Virginia during the Civil War. Lee also works in digital humanities, teaches a digital history class, and served as a project manager of the Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War at the Virginia Center for Digital History.

Office Hours

• By appointment.

Extension and Community Engagement

• North Carolina Historical Commission, 2023-present

Research Publications

Lee, Susanna Michele. Claiming the Union: Loyal Citizenship in the Post-Civil War South. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

—–. At the Center of War, 1859-1870: Homefront as Battlefront in Central Virginia during the Civil War and Reconstruction. University of Kentucky Press, under consideration.

—–. “Citizens and Traitors: Determining Loyalty in the Post-Civil War South.” In Citizenship and Identity in the 19th-Century South, edited by William A. Link and David Brown. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013.

—–. “Reconciliation in Reconstruction Virginia. In Crucible of the Civil War, edited by Edward L. Ayers and Andrew Torget. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2006.

—–. “Contested Unionism: William Pattie and the Southern Claims Commission.” In Virginia’s Civil War, edited by Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2005.

Presentations

• “Remembering Sacrifice and Suffering, Claiming Citizenship,” What a Cruel Thing is War, North Carolina Civil War Sesquicentennial, February 2015
• “Mapping the American Civil War,” Narrating the Visual, Visualizing the Narrative Conference, March 2010
• Roundtable on Civil War Memory, Southern Historical Association Conference, November 2009
• “The Antithesis of Citizens and Traitors: Loyalty in the Post-Civil War South,” at “Understanding America, Understanding the South,” University of Florida, January 2009 (invited)
• “Former Slaves’ Claims to Loyal Union Citizenship in Post-Civil War America, 1871-1880,” Society of Civil War Historians Conference, June 2008
• “Competing Narratives of the Civil War during Reconstruction,” at “Civil War Experiences,” University of North Carolina, Greensboro, April 2008 (invited)
• “In Black or White: Free People of African Descent in the Nineteenth-Century United States South,” American Historical Association Conference, January 2008
• “Former Slaves as ‘Loyal Citizens’: The Line between Property and Person,” Southern Historical Association Conference, November 2006
• “Claiming the Union: Stories of Loyalty in the Post-Civil War South,” Remembering America’s Civil War, University of Mississippi, May 2005.
• “Logic of Segregation:  Mississippi ‘Chinese’ in ‘Black’ and ‘White,’” Race and Place in the Americas, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, March 2003
• “‘So That We Might Have a Better Life’:  Black Loyalties in the Wartime and Postwar South,” Southern Historical Association Conference, November 2002
• “‘A Good Southern Man’: A Case Study from the Southern Claims Commission in Virginia, 1871-1880,” Douglas Southall Freeman and Southern Intellectual History Conferences, University of Richmond, February 2002

Funded Research

• NEH Summer Seminar, American Indian Center, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, June and July 2011
• Scholarly Project Award, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, North Carolina State University, Summer 2008
• Grant, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Battlefield Park and Richmond National Battlefield Park, National Park Service, Spring 2004 to Summer 2008
• Predoctoral Fellowship, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute, December 2002 to July 2003
• Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship, Virginia Historical Society, Summer 2002

Graduate Advising

Professor Lee accepts graduate students working on topics related to nineteenth-century United States history, especially the American South and Civil War and Reconstruction.

• Douglas Porter, “Defying the ‘Destructives’: Confederate Disaffection and Disloyalty in North Carolina’s Northwestern Foothills, 1861-1865” (History M.A., 2007)
• Matthew C. Hulbert, “Politics of the Black Flag: Guerrilla Memory and Southern Conservatism in the New South” (History M.A., 2010)
• Elizabeth Martin, “‘The Extremest Necessity’: Lincoln’s Policies on Civil Liberties and Citizen Responses, 1861-1865” (History M.A., 2010)
• Eric Duncan, “‘Make the Letters Big and Plain’: A History of Black Education in North Carolina” (History M.A., 2011)
• Melissa Matthews, Vindicating the Confederacy: Confederate Female Spies and their Memoirs 1863-1876 (History M.A., 2011)
• Megan Lyon, “Southern Womanhood in Transition: The Writings and Reminiscences of Virginia Clay Clopton” (History M.A., 2014)
• Stefanie King, “Consent and Coercion in the Central Piedmont of North Carolina during the Civil War Era” (History M.A., 2015)
• Andrew Benton, The Press and the Sword: Journalism, Racial Violence, and Political Control in Postbellum North Carolina (History M.A, 2016)
• Patrick Creghan, The Impact of Confederate Laws on Class Dissent in the North Carolina Piedmont (History M.A., 2016)
• Jennifer Waldkirch, Black Historical Memory of Slavery and Emancipation in the Activism and Politics of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and late Pan-African Movements, 1960-1988 (History M.A., 2018)

Area(s) of Expertise

United States History; Citizenship; Settler Colonialism; Native American History; African American History