Susanna Lee received her PhD in History from the University of Virginia. She is an associate professor in the History Department at North Carolina State University where she teaches classes on United States history as well as methodological classes on historical writing and digital history. She has also taught at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Wake Forest University, and Duke University.
Lee’s book, Claiming the Union, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014, examines Southerners’ claims to loyal citizenship in the reunited nation after the American Civil War. Southerners–male and female; elite and non-elite; white, black, and Native American–disagreed with the federal government over the obligations citizens owed to their nation and the obligations the nation owed to its citizens. Lee explores these clashes through the operations of the Southern Claims Commission, a federal body that rewarded compensation for wartime losses to Southerners who proved that they had been loyal citizens of the Union. Lee argues that Southerners forced the federal government to consider how white men who had not been soldiers and voters, and women and racial minorities who had not been allowed to serve in those capacities, could also qualify as loyal citizens. Postwar considerations of the former Confederacy potentially demanded a reconceptualization of citizenship that replaced exclusions by race and gender with inclusions according to loyalty.
Lee is currently working on a book manuscript entitled: Unsettling Claims: Dakotas’ Fifty-Year Quest to Reverse their Losses in the US-Dakota War.
Active in professional service, Lee previously serving as the Director of Graduate Programs and as a member of the Administrative Board of the Graduate School at North Carolina State University. Dr. Lee has also held a variety of leadership positions, including Assistant Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary Affairs and Partnerships in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University. Lee currently serves on the Executive Council of Society of Civil War Historians.