Aaron Sheehan-Dean 

Fred C. Frey Professor

Department Chair

224 Himes Hall
578-4470
[email protected]

Website: https://www.sheehan-dean.com/

Courses Taught

Civil War and Reconstruction; History of the New South, Graduate Readings Seminar on 19th Century America

 

Current Research Interests

Violence, Morality, and the Laws of War

 

Interested in Directing Theses On

19th-Century American political or social history, Civil War history

 

Education

BA, Northwestern University, 1992; MA University of Virginia, 1999; PhD University of Virginia, 2003

 

Awards and Honors

Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, 2009-
Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow, The Huntington Library, 2002
Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship, Virginia Historical Society, 2001

 

Notable Articles

“Foreword,” Civil War at 150: Turning Points, OAH Magazine of History (April 2013).
“Politics in Civil War Virginia: A Democracy on Trial,” in William C. Davis and James I. Robertson, eds. Virginia at War, 1864 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).
“‘It Is Old Virginia and We Must Have It’: Overcoming Regionalism in Civil War Virginia” in Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew Torget, eds. Crucible of the Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).
“Justice Has Something To Do With It: Class Relations and the Confederate Army,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 113 (December 2005): 341-77.
“Everyman’s War: Confederate Enlistment in Civil War Virginia,” Civil War History 50 (March, 2004): 5-36. *Reprinted in Michael Perman and Amy Murrell Taylor, eds. Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction, 3rd Ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011), 187-199.

 

Books

Editor, A Companion to the U.S. Civil War (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)

Editor, The Civil War, The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It, February (New York:

Library of America, 2014).

Co-author, American Horizons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Co-editor, with Brooks Simpson and Stephen Sears, The Civil War, The First Year of the Conflict Told by Those Who Lived It, November 1860-January 1862 (New York: Library of America, 2011).
Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S. Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Editor, The View From the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007).
Editor, Struggle for a Vast Future: The American Civil War (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2006).