Joan E. Cashin; B.A., The American University, 1977; M.A., 1980; Ph.D., 1985, Harvard University.

An historian of the United States, Professor Cashin specializes in social, economic, and cultural history, including the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. She has published A FAMILY VENTURE; MEN AND WOMEN ON THE SOUTHERN FRONTIER(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 1994); OUR COMMON AFFAIRS; TEXTS FROM WOMEN IN THE OLD SOUTH (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); THE WAR WAS YOU AND ME; CIVILIANS IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) [editor]; FIRST LADY OF THE CONFEDERACY; VARINA DAVIS'S CIVIL WAR (2006, 2008); WAR STUFF: THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (2018); and WAR MATTERS; MATERIAL CULTURE IN THE CIVIL ERA [editor] (2018). WAR STUFF received the Outstanding Book Award in the Field of History from the Ohio Academy, the Firebird Prize, and the Finalist Award from the Civil War Roundtable of New Jersey.  In 2023, Academic Studies Press published WAR STUFF in Russian, the first time a monograph on the American Civil War has been translated into that language.  The Davis biography won the Fletcher Pratt Award from the Civil War Roundtable of New York and was a finalist for three other prizes. She has also published over twenty articles in scholarly publications. 

She has served on the prize committees for the Anne Braden Prize (which she founded), the Merle Curti Prize, the Beveridge-Dunning Prize, the Berkshire Prize, and the Lincoln Prize, as well as the selection committee for the James Madison Fellowship, among other prizes; currently she serves on the board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and the editorial board of the JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY, OHIO VALLEY HISTORY, and other journals. For twenty years (1994-2014), she co-edited a series on Gender Relations in the American Experience at Johns Hopkins University Press, with Professor Ron Walters.  In 2023-2024, she is serving as president of the state historians' association, the Ohio Academy of History.