Jim Downs, Editor
Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-NEH Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, which has been translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. His other books include Sick from Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation. He has edited seven anthologies, and published essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Lancet, LA Times. He is a partner at History Studio, co-editor of History in the Headlines, and Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia. In 2022-23, Downs was a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African American Studies at Harvard and was elected to Society for American Historians, the Royal Historical Society in the UK, and the Executive Board of the Southern Historical Association. In 2015-16, he was a Mellon New Directions Fellow, which allowed him to return to graduate school, after tenure, and gain training in medical anthropology and epidemiology at Harvard. He earned his BA in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in American Studies from Columbia, and MPhil and PhD in History from Columbia.
Downs is currently a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.
Crystal N. Feimster, Associate Editor
Crystal N. Feimster is associate professor in the Departments of African American Studies and History and the Programs of American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is the author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard, 2009), which won the North East Black Studies Association 2010 W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize and received Honorable Mention for the Organization of American Historians’ 2010 Darlene Clark Hine Award.
Matthew Fox-Amato, Book Review Editor
Matthew Fox-Amato is associate professor of history at the University of Idaho. He is the author of Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America (Oxford University Press, 2019). Exposing Slavery was the runner-up for the 2021 Shapiro Book Prize of the Huntington Library, a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, and a finalist for the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award. The book was also named one of The Advocate’s “Must-Read Books on Race and Hate.” Fox-Amato received his BA from Harvard University and his PhD in History, with a certificate in Visual Studies, at the University of Southern California, after which he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis.
Civil War History 