About Dr Frances Clarke
I completed my PhD in 2001 at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. I then worked as a researcher at the American Historical Association in Washington DC, before taking up my position in the History Department at Sydney University in 2003. Since that time, I have taught units covering a range of topics in American history from the colonial era through to the turn of the twentieth-century. In 2005, I was awarded a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Award. More recently, my monograph, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North jointly won the AHA’s Hancock Prize 2011-12 for the best first book in any field of history.
My research interests include: nineteenth-century US History; Civil War and Reconstruction; war, trauma and memory; cultural history; gender and race relations in America
I am currently collaborating on a book-length study that examines the history of child soldiers in America, from the Revolution to WWI. In 2013, I will be away on research, working on this project with my co-author, Rebecca Jo Plant from the University of California, San Diego. We have funding for this project from four sources: an American Antiquarian Society Short-term Fellowship; a Bara Foundation International Fellowship to work at the Library Company of Philadelphia; a Newberry Library Short-term Fellowship; and an Andrew F. Mellon Short-term Fellowship to work at the Massachusetts Historical Society. I am also completing a two volume co-edited collection (with Fitzhugh Brundage, Clare Corbould, and Mike McDonnell) on how the American Revolution has been remembered and memorialized over the past several hundred years. I am also working on two separate articles: the first examining feminism and free labor ideology; the second comparing combat trauma in the Civil War and WWI.
For more details see: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/history/staff/profiles/clarke.shtml
Selected publications
- War Stories: Suffering and Redemption in the Civil War North (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming, 2011)
- W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Frances M. Clarke, Clare Corbould, and Michael McDonnell, eds., Memory, History, and Nation-Making in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (Massachusetts University Press, in progress).
- Rebecca Plant and Frances Clarke, “Enough to Cause a Social Explosion”: Black Protest and the Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s,” (under consideration by Journal of African American History).
- “Forgetting the Women: Debates over Female Patriotism in the Aftermath of America’s Civil War,” Journal of Women’s History (accepted for publication Sept 2009).
- "So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates Over Emotional Control During the American Civil War," Journal of Social History 41, 2 (Winter 2007): 253-71.
- “‘Let All Nations See’: Civil War Nationalism and the Memorialization of Wartime Voluntarism,” Civil War History 52, 1 (2006): 66-93.
- “‘Honorable Scars’: Northern Amputees and the Meaning of Civil War Injuries,” in Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences and Postwar Adjustments (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002).