Rate My Professor Jim Downs

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.