The author of Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (University Press of Virginia, 1999) and Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), as well as recent essays about Alexander Gardner’s photography at Gettysburg (in Lens of War, ed. J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher [University of North Carolina Press, 2015]); the Battle of the Crater in fiction (in Cold Harbor to the Crater, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Caroline E. Janney [University of North Carolina Press, 2015]); and Joseph E. Johnston (Essential Civil War Curriculum, an online project of the Civil War Center at Virginia Tech). He has also published essays about Ambrose Bierce, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Abraham Lincoln, and Walt Whitman.
Cushman’s current projects include discussions of Philip Sheridan’s memoirs; Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender to William T. Sherman; and Richard Taylor’s book Destruction and Reconstruction. In addition, he is the author of six volumes of poems and two critical studies of American poetry, and he is the general editor of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
A frequent speaker at Civil War conferences at Gettysburg College and the Huntington Library, he has enjoyed teaching with Gary Gallagher a Civil War seminar for advanced undergraduates at the University of Virginia. Cushman was named Cavalier Distinguished Professor for 2014-16, and he won a State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Outstand Faculty Award in 2015.