Research Grants
2026-27 research grants awarded
The Virginia Center for Civil War Studies and Virginia Tech’s Special Collections and University Archives have awarded the 2026-27 Virginia Center for Civil War Studies Research Grants to Howell Keiser; Michael L. Strauss; and James “Trae” Welborn. Congratulations!
Each grant recipient will visit Virginia Tech’s Special Collections and University Archives in order to conduct research on some aspect of the American Civil War era. Recipients may also have the opportunity to give an informal presentation on their projects during their visit. Graduate students, faculty members, and independent scholars are all eligible.
Virginia Tech’s Special Collections and University Archives contain one of the largest concentrations of Civil War-related research materials in the world, including 10,000 rare printed sources, and hundreds of manuscript collections containing diaries, letters, ledgers, official papers, and other formats. Highlights include soldiers’ accounts from both the Union and the Confederacy; printed memoirs and regimental histories; correspondence from the homefront; primary sources focused on slavery and abolitionism; papers documenting political change in Virginia and the South; and records of postwar groups focused on memorializing the Civil War.
2026-27 Research Grant Recipients
Dr. Howell Keiser's book project, The Dismal Science of Disunion, explains how elite Southerners in the antebellum period used ideas about population—how people moved, grew, and worked—to justify slavery and, ultimately, secession. They saw population growth not as neutral, but as a dangerous force that required both the expansion of slavery and a commitment to dispersed agriculture to maintain order and avoid the kind of social conflict they associated with the North. By showing how these arguments turned political questions into matters of necessity, the project offers a new explanation for why sectional conflict hardened so quickly before the Civil War, while also highlighting a central irony: even as these thinkers criticized modern capitalism, they relied on its financial and institutional tools to sustain and expand the slaveholding South. Keiser is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida.
Michael L. Strauss, MA, AG, AGL, is an independent scholar and a U.S. Coast Guard veteran. He holds an MA in history from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where his thesis explored the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service’s participation in the Spanish-American War. His research will examine how enlisted soldiers and junior officers in both Union and Confederate armies witnessed and understood military executions, and what these accounts reveal about discipline, race, unit cohesion, and the lived realities of military justice beyond formal service records.
Dr. James Hill "Trae" Welborn III is the author of Tailgating with Jesus and General Lee: The Religion of the Lost Cause in Southern College Football, which analyzes the intersection of Civil War memory and religion in southern popular culture through college football. From its beginning in the late 19th century, southern college football both reflected and shaped southern cultural values and identities, especially those aspects grounded in the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War Era and its status as a “civil religion” among many white southerners. Throughout the 20th Century the rhetoric and ritual of southern college football continued to chart the role of Lost Cause tropes as they evolved in dynamic tension with shifts in the broader regional society and culture from the 1890s through 1990s. Welborn is Associate Professor at Georgia College & State University.
2025-26 Research Grant Recipients
Dr. Jewel Parker’s research project, “The Intercultural Origins of Health Care in the Antebellum South,” explores how interactions between American Indians, Africans, and Europeans influenced medical practices and shaped the development of medicines in the southern United States from the 1600s to the 1800s. Euromerican doctors actively sought out knowledge from other cultures to find the most effective treatments. Recognizing these diverse contributions to southern medicine helps highlight the important roles American Indians and Africans played in that history and opens the door for exploring other ways that different cultures shaped life in the South prior to and during the American Civil War. Parker is a full-time lecturer at Appalachian State University.
Madelaine Setiawan is a PhD student at Texas A&M University. Her research aims to construct a complete picture in the ways Southern Unionist women contributed to the wartime effort and were honored, remembered, or forgotten afterward. She explores how Union soldiers, prisoners of war, politicians, and the collective public commemorated Southern Unionist women.
