In 2025, the Nau Civil War Center established a competitive, one-year postdoctoral research associateship in the history of the Civil War era.
The Center also awards a one-year "internal" postdoctoral research associateship for recent PhD graduates of UVA's Corcoran Department of History who completed a dissertation on a topic related to the Civil War era.
These positions promote scholars' professional development and enable them to make significant progress on their book projects. The research associates spend the academic year in residence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attend the Nau Center's public lectures, manuscript workshops, and other relevant events. During the year, they produce a book proposal and workshop at least one chapter. They have no teaching or administrative responsibilities.
2026-27 Postdoctoral Research Associates
Mikala Stokes
Mikala Stokes is a historian and writer, specializing in nineteenth-century United States history. Her forthcoming book, tentatively titled Embattled Hearts: Black Men, Family, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America, chronicles how Black male activists drew on their experiences of domestic life in their struggle to uplift African Americans and build democratic institutions from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Most recently, she served as assistant editor of Open Rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, an open-access digital journal of public scholarship focused on climate change and environmental justice. Mikala earned a B.A. in History from the University of Cincinnati and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University.
Jeremy Nelson
Jeremy Nelson received his PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 2025. His research interests include the history of environmental change, early American political thought, the breakdown of civic order, the wartime homefront, slavery and emancipation, and relationships between humans and animals. His first book, currently undergoing editorial review, is tentatively titled Dominion or Desolation?: Southern Ecology, Confederate Nationalism, and the Civil War. The manuscript revises conventional wisdom about the destructiveness of the war upon the natural world while also revealing how a fear of wilderness reversion lay at the heart of Confederate ideology. Nelson's writing has appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era and America’s Civil War, and you can read a series of his posts on our blog. He has taught a range of history courses at U.Va., and he chaired the Nau Center’s Civil War Seminar from 2023–2024 and 2025–2026. You can reach him at jan4wg@virginia.edu.
Previous Postdoctoral Research Associates
2025-26
Andrew Turner received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2025. His dissertation was entitled, "War is the Business of Youth: Youth Soldiers, Manhood, and Their Enduring Civil War." 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.
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).