Faculty

Profile

Amanda Bellows is a historian of the United States and an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has previously taught at Hunter College and Middlebury College. 

She is the author of The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions (William Morrow / HarperCollins, 2024) and American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). She co-edited the book South Writ Large: Stories from the Global South (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

Dr. Bellows has conducted archival research in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia. Her writing has appeared in academic journals as well as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Smithsonian, and the books Race and Gender at War: Writing American Military History, Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America, New York Times Disunion: A History of the Civil War and Disunion: Modern Historians Revisit and Reconsider the Civil War from Lincoln's Election to the Emancipation Proclamation. She has shared her research with public audiences via C-Span, Gilder Lehrman's Book Breaks, and various news programs.

Her scholarship has received funding or awards from the New-York Historical Society, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education, the British Library, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, the Robert Bosch Foundation, and the University of North Carolina Press. 

Degrees Held

Ph.D. in History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016

M.A. in History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012

B.A. in History and Political Science, Middlebury College, 2008

Professional Affiliation

Member, Gilder Lehrman Institute’s President’s Council (2020-present)

Member of the American Historical Association (2010-present)

Member of the Organization of American Historians (2016-present)

Member of the Southern Historical Association (2010-present)

Member, British American Nineteenth Century Historians (2011-present)

Member of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2010-present)

Member of the Society of Civil War Historians (2013-present)