Professor Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era Secretary-Treasurer, Southern Historical Association Co-Director, Center for Virtual History Associate Academic Director for Digital Humanities, Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Stephen Berry feels compelled to study "old, unhappy, far-off things." A historian of mortality, his research explores the intersections of race, class, gender, family, violence, health and mortality outcomes in the nineteenth-century American South. He is the author or editor of seven books on America in the mid-19th century, including his most recent, Count the Dead: Quantification and the Birth of Death as We Know It (UNC press, 2022). Berry is Secretary-Treasurer of the Southern Historical Association; co-director, with Claudio Saunt, of the Center for Virtual History; and co-editor, with Amy Murrell Taylor, of the UnCivil Wars series at the University of Georgia Press. A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, Berry helps lead the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Georgia's Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Currently he is at work on The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg. Berry oversees two major web projects: 1) CSI Dixie, devoted to the coroner's office in the nineteenth century South; and 2) Private Voices, which collects the letters of Civil War soldiers, North and South, Black, white, and Native, who wrote 'by ear.' Berry's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. Research Research Areas: African American Cultural & Intellectual Digital History U.S. 19th & 20th Century U.S. South War and Diplomacy Race and Slavery U.S. Civil War Selected Publications Selected Publications: “The Most Important Thing That Ever Happened: Big, Bad Data and the Doubling of Human Life Expectancy” in a special issue of the Journal of Planning History devoted to “The Body Politic: Planning History, Design, and Public Health” (May 2021; permalink). “The Web, the Archive, and the Morgue” in a special issue of The Southern Quarterly on the “Digital South” (Winter 2021). “The Insider’s Outsider: Edgar Allan Poe and the Art of Self-Destruction” in Steven M. Stowe and Sarah Gardner, eds., Insiders, Outsiders: New Directions in the Intellectual History of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). “Database of Coroners’ Inquisitions Taken Over the Bodies of Enslaved, Formerly Enslaved, and Free Black Peoples in the U.S. South, 1840s-1890s,” Journal of Slavery & Data Preservation (December 2020). “Historiography of the South and the Civil War: From Reconciliation to Reckoning, 1970-present” in Craig T. Friend and Lorri Glover, eds., Reinterpreting Southern Histories (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020). “Dwelling in the Digital Archive: A Meditation on the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Project” in Register of the Kentucky Historical Society (2019). “From Household to Personhood in America” in Lisa Tendrick Franks and LeeAnn Whites, eds., The Civil War as a Household War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019). “The Church in the Maelstrom” in Gary Gallagher and J. Matthew Gallman, eds., Civil War Places: Seeing the Conflict Through the Eyes of Its Leading Historians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). “The Book or the Gun?” in Gary Gallagher and J. Matthew Gallman, eds., The Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). “Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Kings,” Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, Special Issue on the Civil War at 150 (Winter 2014). Education Education: PhD, University of North Carolina, History 2000 Other Information Of note: Digital Extension Grant, American Council of Learned Societies, 2017 Digital Innovation Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies, 2013 Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2006-2007 Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, 2009-2021 Parks-Heggoy Award, UGA History Graduate Student Association, for excellence in graduate student teaching, 2010, 2016
