Rate My Professor Jim Downs

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He holds a PhD from Columbia University (2005), an MA from Columbia University (2001), and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania (1995). In 2015-16, he received the Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship, which enabled postgraduate training in medical anthropology and global health at Harvard University. Downs's research specializations include Civil War Era Studies, the history of medicine and public health, African-American Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. He serves as Editor of Civil War History, co-series editor of History in the Headlines at the University of Georgia Press, and Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia (2024).

Downs is the author of several influential books, including Sick From Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2012), Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016; University of Georgia Press paperback, 2020), Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (Harvard University Press, 2021; translated into Chinese, French, Korean, Japanese, and Russian), Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections (University of Georgia Press, 2020), Reckoning with History: Unfinished Stories of American Freedom (Columbia University Press, 2021), and January 6th and the Politics of History (University of Georgia Press, 2024). He has co-edited anthologies such as Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation with David Blight (University of Georgia Press, 2017) and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America with Jennifer Brier and Jennifer Morgan (University of Illinois Press, 2016). His articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. Downs has received major awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2025), the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies (2022-23), a National Endowment for the Humanities grant (2022) to direct a summer institute on Civil War archives, and election to the Society of American Historians, the Royal Historical Society, and the Executive Council of the Southern Historical Association (2023). He is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.