DR. CATHERINE CLINTON holds the Denman Endowed Chair of American History at the University of Texas San Antonio and is Chair Professor Emerita at Queen’s University Belfast. She has held visiting chairs at a variety of institutions including the Citadel, the City University of New York, the University of Richmond, among others. She most recently taught American history at the School of Anglophone Studies at the University of Toulouse. She served as president of the Southern Historical Association in 2016, the same year she won a Guggenheim Award for her project on Civil War soldiers.
She has written and/or edited over thirty books, from The Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Old South (1982) to her most recent publication U.S. History at the 250 th (to be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2026). Her award-winning Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom has been selected by the National Endowment for the Arts “Big Read Program” for 2026-2027 when the grant cycle will center around the theme America250.
Clinton served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1986 and was the Chair for the
1993 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. She was a member of the National Book Award’s jury for Non-
Fiction in 2003.
She was selected for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Bicentennial Commission (2004-2010)
and wrote an introduction for “Lincoln as Self-Made Man,” Lincoln In American Memory (Library
of America & National Endowment for the Humanities We the People Initiative, 2009) as well as
Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (2008).
As a founding member of the Biography International Organization, she has also served on the
boards of the Society for American Historians, the editorial boards of Civil War History and Civil
War Times, the Scholarly Advisory Council for President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldier’s Home,
the Lincoln Forum and the Ford’s Theatre Foundation. She is currently on advisory boards for
two museums, The Alamo Trust Foundation in San Antonio, Texas and the Museum of the
Troubles and Peace in Northern Ireland (which has been designated as an awardee for 2025-27
by the World Monument Foundation.)