About Us

Mission Statement

The Nau Civil War Center promotes scholarship, teaching, and public outreach regarding the United States in the era of the Civil War. It draws on rich resources at the University of Virginia, including members of the faculty in several departments and schools, impressive library holdings in both published and manuscript materials, talented graduate students from across the United States and abroad, and a deep pool of undergraduate students with an interest in the field.

The Center builds on longstanding strengths in the Department of History, which over the past 20 years has trained dozens of doctoral students in the field who have published widely in refereed journals, contributed to many books of essays, written a number of well-received books from leading presses, and competed successfully for tenure-track positions at colleges and universities. At the undergraduate level, courses relating to the South and 19th-century U.S. history consistently attract large and appreciative enrollments.

The Center‘s expansive program will include support for graduate and undergraduate research, funding for lectures and conferences designed to reach academic and lay audiences, a book prize for superior scholarship in the field, a postdoctoral fellowship, and undergraduate internships at public historical sites and institutions.

The Center’s activities will help maintain the University’s reputation as a preeminent location to explore a profoundly disruptive and transformative period in American history.

Caroline E. Janney is Director of the Nau Civil War Center and John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War.

A native of the Shenandoah Valley, she is the author or editor of six books, including Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Littlefield Fund for Southern History and University of North Carolina Press, 2013), Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), and Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee's Army after Appomattox (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Remembering the Civil War was selected for the History Book Club and Military Book Club and won the Charles S. Sydnor Award by the Southern Historical Association and the Jefferson Davis Award by the American Civil War Museum. Ends of War won the 2022 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

An active public speaker, she has given presentations at locations such as the Lincoln Presidential Library, Clinton Presidential Library, Huntington Library, and Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute, and she has appeared on C-SPAN as well as NPR. She is a speaker with the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lectureship program and a recipient of the Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award from Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts. She serves as a co-editor of the University of North Carolina Press’s Civil War America Series and is a past president of the Society of Civil War Historians.

You can reach her by email at cej4b@virginia.edu.

Brian C. Neumann is Managing Director and Digital Historian of the Nau Civil War Center.

He graduated from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2020. His work has appeared in The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Southern Studies, the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, and Protest in the Long Eighteenth Century. His first book, Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis, was published by LSU Press in 2022.

He is deeply committed to public history, and he worked as an editorial assistant on the Nau Civil War Center's "UVA Unionists" and "Black Virginians in Blue" digital projects. As a graduate student, he was an editorial assistant for Encyclopedia Virginia and a research assistant for the "Jefferson's University: The Early Life" project. He also served as the lead researcher for Furman's "50th Anniversary Desegregation Commemoration Committee" and was the only graduate student appointed to the "President's Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation." He has given presentations at Furman, the College of Charleston, Manassas National Battlefield Park, the Upcountry History Museum, and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

You can reach him by email at bcn3xu@virginia.edu.

Contact

Mailing Address:
Nau Center for Civil War History
1540 Jefferson Park Avenue
PO Box 400180
Charlottesville, VA 22904

Email:
naucenter@virginia.edu

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