Education

B.A., M.A., J.D., Ph D. Harvard University

Research

Teaches U.S. history with special interests in the Civil War and Reconstruction era and in cultural and intellectual history.

Publications

Professor Brown is the co-author, with Professor Carol Harrison, of Zouave Theaters: Transnational Military Fashion and Performance (Louisiana State University Press, 2024). His previous book, Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), received the Tom Watson Brown Book Award of the Society of Civil War Historians. He is also the author of Civil War Canon: Sites of Confederate Memory in South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and Dorothea Dix, New England Reformer (Harvard University Press, 1998). He has edited several books, including Remixing the Civil War: Meditations on the Sesquicentennial (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (Oxford University Press, 2006). He is the co-editor of Hope and Glory: Essays on the Legacy of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

Activities

I am working on a book about the Boston Common monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. I also continue to work with the Historic Columbia on historical interpretation at the Museum of Reconstruction at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home. I am pleased to advise graduate students in US history and public history.