Civil War Weekend Speakers 2026
Dawn Chitty is the Director of Education at the African American Civil War Memorial Museum, where she has served since 2010. With a background in anthropology, education, and museum pedagogy, she specializes in the interpretation of 18th- and 19th-century history, developing programs on colonial life, slavery, and African American history.
William C. “Jack” Davis is the author or editor of more than 50 books in Civil War and Southern history. He retired in 2013 as Executive Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. His latest book, coedited with Sue Heth Bell, is The Whartons' War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton & Anne Radford Wharton, 1863-1865. Among his awards are a record fourth Jefferson Davis Award from the American Civil War Museum and the Richard Nelson Current Award from the Lincoln Forum.
Curt Fields has portrayed General and President Grant in 22 states as he travels the nation presenting his portrayal of General and President Ulysses S. Grant. He researches and reads extensively about the General and President in order to deliver an accurate persona of the General. Presentations are in first person, quoting from General Grant’s Memoirs, articles, letters and statements the General wrote, interviews he gave and first-person accounts of people who knew the General or witnessed him during events. Being the same height and body style as General Grant, he puts before the audience a convincing, true-to-life image of the man as he really looked. In the 21st century, Curt is a retired secondary school administrator and college instructor. He also has a background in law-enforcement, having served as Memphis, TN, police officer and hostage negotiator.
Margaret Humphreys is the Josiah Charles Trent Professor of the History of Medicine (emeritus) at Duke University. She is the author of five monographs in the history of medicine. After focusing in the first two on the course of yellow fever and malaria in the American South, she, with trepidation, took up the story of medicine in the US Civil War. She began with an exploration of the medical condition and care of the USCT, and then ventured more broadly into the study of hospital care, and especially the role of women therein. In the fall of 2024, she published Searching for Dr. Harris, which documents the story of J.D. Harris, a Black doctor who served on the Virginia peninsula during the war, and later practiced in Washington, D.C. He was born in 1832, when it was illegal to teach Black students to read in his home state of North Carolina. Humphreys is moving on to the history of polar exploration and the role of health and disease in such enterprises.
Kurt Luther is an associate professor of computer science and, by courtesy, history at Virginia Tech. He is the founding president of The Photo Sleuth Foundation, a non-profit organization whose flagship project, Civil War Photo Sleuth, uses crowdsourcing and AI-based facial recognition to identify unknown soldiers in Civil War-era photographs. He is a senior editor and columnist at Military Images magazine and a member of the Military Writers Guild.
Stuart Marshall is the postdoctoral associate at the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. His current book project, The Age of Junaluska, traces the Civil War origins of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and their manipulation of the “Lost Cause” in struggles for citizenship and sovereignty. With colleagues at Western Carolina University, he is also working on the first volume of Eastern Cherokee Histories in Translation (ECHT), which will focus on Civil War letters written in Cherokee syllabary. Marshall is also a contributor to several forthcoming edited volumes including Rethinking the ‘Indian Wars’.
Sarah Kay Bierle graduated from Thomas Edison State University with a BA in History and works in the Education Department at American Battlefield Trust. She has spent years exploring ways to share quality historical research in ways that will inform and inspire modern audiences, including school presentations, writing, battlefield tours, and speaking engagements. She continues to study the Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley and has published seven books, including "Glorious Courage: John Pelham in the Civil War" (Savas Beatie, 2025) and "Decisions at Chancellorsville" (University of Tennessee Press, 2025).
Paul Quigley is James I. Robertson, Jr. Associate Professor of Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech, where he also serves as Director of the Center for Humanities and Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. A native of Manchester, England, he is the author of the prize-winning Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-1865. His next book, The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to Civil War, will be published in May 2026.
Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He is the author or editor of 21 books that cover a variety of topics related to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Among his awards are the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award (2019), CNU’s Alumni Society Award for Teaching and Mentoring (2016), the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Prize (2015), the University of Maryland Alumni Excellence Award in Research (2024), the Jack Miller Center’s Teaching Excellence Award (2024), and the Penn State History Department’s Outstanding Alumni Award (2025). His recent books include A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (2022), which was co-winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize (with Jon Meacham); Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (2023); A Great and Good Man: Rare First-hand Accounts and Observations of Abraham Lincoln (2024); an exciting new children’s book, My Day with Abe Lincoln (2024); and Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (2025).