2024-25 Research grants awarded
The Virginia Center for Civil War Studies and Virginia Tech’s Special Collections and University Archives have announced the recipients of the 2024-25 Virginia Center for Civil War Studies Research Grants.
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.
2024-25 Research Grant Recipients
Dr. Susan Stanfield (left) the author of “Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth Century Print Culture,” is an Associate Professor in history at the University of Texas at El Paso. While visiting Virginia Tech she will research women’s cooking during the Civil War examining how recipes are named (for example, Robert E. Lee Cake), how women overcame food shortages, and most importantly, how women demonstrated their political activism through baking.
Dr. David Schieffler (right), a historian at Crowder College in Neosho, Missouri, will look at materials related to two projects on which he is currently working: an “Environment and the American Civil War” primary source reader for use in college classrooms, and a monograph tentatively titled “Civil War in the Delta: Nature, Race, and the 1863 Helena Campaign,” which argues that nature proved pivotal in one of the most significant engagements of the Civil War west of the Mississippi.
MaryBeth Allison (left) is a PhD student at Liberty University. Allison’s dissertation, “Shine a Light into the Darkness: Illuminating the Battles Fought by Civil War Prisoners of War,” focuses on the experiences of Civil War prisoners of war, through their own words. By utilizing prisoners’ letters, diaries, and memoirs, the argument is made that prisoners continued fighting battles once captured as the prisons became their battlefields.
2023-24 Research Grant Recipients
Noah Crawford (left) is a PhD candidate at Texas A&M University. Crawford will research refugees during the American Civil War: how displaced people experienced the conflict, and how they impacted its course and aftermath.
John Martin McMillan (right) is a PhD student at West Virginia University. McMillan’s project, 
“Feeding Confederate Virginia: The Stuff of Subsistence,” explores food systems in Virginia during the Civil War to explain the roles of non-human actors in feeding Black and White citizens and soldiers across the Old Dominion.
Andrew Turner (left) is a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Turner’s research examines how youth soldiers of the Civil War formed identities during wartime which they carried throughout their lives. He explores how soldiers under the age of eighteen navigated coming of age during wartime and then inserted their recollections of youthful soldiering into Civil War memory in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Click here to learn about previous research grant recipients