Sep 12, 2019 - The 2019 Carls-Schwerdfeger Lectureship will feature prize-winning Civil War historian Dr. Joan Waugh, Professor of History at UCLA. She will speak twice on Monday, October 21. At 2:00 p.m., Waugh will lecture on “Ulysses S. Grant and the Nature of Surrender during the Civil War” in Salon II of the Carl Grant Events Center. Her evening talk will be on “Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier-Statesman” at 7:15 p.m. in the G. M. Savage Memorial Chapel. These lectures are free and open to the public.
Waugh has authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited six books that deal with the American Civil War and after. In 2015, she co-authored, along with Gary Gallagher of the University of Virginia, The American War: A History of the Civil War Era. Her book U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (2009) won several prizes, including the William H. Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography and the Jefferson Davis Book Award. The book was also named a 2010 Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title. She co-edited Wars within a War: Controversies and Conflict over the American Civil War, which appeared in 2009. In 2004, she was co-editor of The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, which won that year’s New York Military Affairs Symposium Civil War Book Award. Waugh also served as the editor of Civil War and Reconstruction, 1856 to 1869 (2003, revised edition in 2010); it is Volume 5 in the multivolume work titled Encyclopedia of American History. Lastly, she authored Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell, which Harvard University Press released in 1998.
In addition to her book awards, Waugh has received many other recognitions. She has earned four teaching awards, including UCLA’s prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award. Her doctoral dissertation was among the finalists for the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians, and she won the Mary Wollstonecraft Dissertation Prize from the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. She has received research awards from the Huntington Library, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Waugh has also served as an interviewee in multiple documentaries, such as the PBS series “American Experience” and the History Channel’s production of “Lee and Grant.”
Waugh graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from UCLA and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in American history at the same university. She has for many years been a member of UCLA’s history department, where she teaches nineteenth-century American history.