Susannah J. Ural, Ph.D. is the Frank & Virginia Williams Chair for Abraham Lincoln & Civil War Studies in the Department of History at Mississippi State University. She specializes in the study of military history, particularly that of nineteenth-century America and the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The author of numerous publications, Ural’s writing almost always ties back to the experiences of soldiers in war and peace. Her work has ranged from an analysis of the motivations of Irish-Catholic volunteers in the Union Army (The Harp and the Eagle, 2006), to the development and evolution of the Confederacy’s most celebrated unit (Hood’s Texas Brigade, 2017), to the personal experience of Americans in the Civil War (Don’t Hurry Me Down to Hades, 2013), to the experiences of marginalized groups at war (ed. Civil War Citizens, 2010). Ural has been a guest editor for a special issue focused on veterans for The Journal of the Civil War Era, she serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Military History (which she chaired from 2014-2019), War & Society, Civil War History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, and Civil War Times Illustrated, and is a past president of the Mississippi Historical Society. Ural co-directs the federally-funded Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi project with Dr. Lindsey R. Peterson. CWRGM digitizes, transcribes, and annotates over 20,000 documents written by Mississippians of all backgrounds during this revolutionary era, making them freely available online.
At Mississippi State University, in addition to her research and teaching, Ural oversees public engagement with the Frank & Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana, which was the nation’s largest private collection of Lincolniana when the Williamses donated it to Mississippi State University in 2017.
Ural’s latest research focuses on Abraham Lincoln and Civil War soldiers. Learn more about her work here.
