In 2025, the Nau Civil War Center established a competitive, one-year postdoctoral fellowship in the history of the Civil War era. This fellowship promotes scholars' professional development and enables them to make significant progress on their book projects. The postdoctoral fellow is expected to spend the academic year in residence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and to attend the Nau Center's public lectures, manuscript workshops, and other relevant events. During the year, they will produce a book proposal and workshop at least one chapter. They will have no teaching or administrative responsibilities.
The Center also awards a one-year postdoctoral fellowship for recent PhD graduates of UVA's Corcoran Department of History who completed a dissertation on a topic related to the Civil War era.
2025-26 Postdoctoral Fellows
Andrew Turner
Turner received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2025. His dissertation, "War is the Business of Youth: Youth Soldiers, Manhood, and Their Enduring Civil War," argues that "underage Civil War soldiers rethought their masculine identities from the margins of adulthood, negotiated limitations on their privileges of citizenship, and interjected the legacy of 'the boys’ war' into American memory as they became the last living Civil War veterans."
He has received research fellowships from UNC-Greensboro, the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech, and the Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has presented his research at the Society of Civil War Historians Conference and the Southern Historical Association Conference, and he has forthcoming articles in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, the Journal of East Tennessee History, and Ohio Valley History.
Jeremy Nelson
Nelson received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2025. His dissertation, "Battles of the Wilderness: Ecology, Ideology, and the American Civil War," argues that "secessionists aimed to protect improvements made to the 'wilderness' by averting the abolition of slavery, but by sparking a bloody conflict, they ushered in the environmental chaos that they feared." He has presented his research at the Society of Civil War Historians Conference and the Southern Historical Association Conference, and he served as an associate editor for Essays in History.
Previous Postdoctoral Fellows
2024-25
J. Jacob Calhoun received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2024. His dissertation was entitled, "Reconstruction through Rifles: The Role of Violence in Black Americans’ Fight for Liberty in the Postemancipation Era." He serves as the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of History and David A. Moore Chair in American History at Wabash College.
2023-24
Jesse George-Nichol received her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2023. She is the author of Conservative Americanism: Nativism, Unionism, and Slavery in Border South Politics, 1854-1861 (Lexington Books, 2024)
2022-23
Stefan Lund received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2022. His dissertation was entitled, "Unfit to Print: The Practice of Press Censorship during the American Civil War."
2020-21
Clayton J. Butler received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2020. He is the author of True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction (LSU Press, 2022). He serves as the marketing and sales associate for the University of Virginia Press and the assistant editor for The American South Series and A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era.
Brian C. Neumann received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2020. He is the author of Bloody Flag of Anarchy: Unionism in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis (LSU Press, 2022). He serves as the managing director and digital historian for the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History.
2018-19
Frank J. Cirillo received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2017. He is the author of The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union (LSU Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Wiley-Silver Prize in Civil War History and was a finalist for the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.
Jack Furniss received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2018. He is the author of Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North (LSU Press, 2024).