Susannah J. Ural

Director of Undergraduate Studies

Susannah Ural holds a Ph.D. in history from Kansas State University.  She specializes in nineteenth-century America, with an emphasis on the socio-military experiences of Civil War soldiers and their families.  She taught at Sam Houston State University in Texas from 2000 - 2009 and recently joined the history faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi.  She is a senior fellow in USM's Center for the Study of War and Society and is also part of USM's Center for the Study of the Gulf South. Dr. Ural teaches courses on the U.S. Civil War era, nineteenth-century America, U.S. military history, and Irish-American and U.S. immigration history.  She is an active member of the Society of Civil War Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the Society for Military History, and is on the editorial board of The Journal of Military History and the journal War and Society.  Her masters and doctoral students generally write on socio-military topics, looking at the motivations and experiences of Civil War soldiers or they study a Civil War-era community responding to war.

In 2006, Dr. Ural published The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861-1865 (NYU Press).  NYU Press published her edited essay collection, Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America's Bloodiest Conflict, in November 2010.  She is the author of "'Remember Your Country and Keep Up Its Credit': Irish-Americans and the Union War Effort, 1861-1865" published in The Journal of Military History in 2005, and other articles and short essays relating to Irish-American military service and the Texas Brigade in popular magazines like America's Civil War (March 2009) and Civil War Times Illustrated (September 2007).  She writes a regular series, "Ural on URLs," for Civil War Times Illustrated that reviews websites focused on the U.S. Civil War Era.  

Dr. Ural's current project is Hood's Texans: A History of the Texas Brigade and Southern Society in the American Civil War, which is under contract with LSU Press.  This book follows the men of the Texas Brigade from recruitment through their postwar reunions, and studies them on the battlefield and in camp, focusing on their support for the Confederacy, their motivations for service, and their ties to their families and the home front.  She is compiling the best of their letters, diaries, and poetry into a collection co-edited with Rick Eiserman titled Voices of the Texas Brigade for the University of Tennessee Press's "Voices of the Civil War" series, as well as editing a Texas Brigade family's correspondence for a project titled, This Murderous Storm: A Confederate Family at War.

Curriculum Vitae | Website