Andrew Donnelly is a literary and cultural historian specializing in the periods of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction and in the field of Southern Studies. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis. He received his PhD from the English Department at Harvard University in 2020. His work has been supported by research fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Working with the Freedom Project Network in Mississippi, he is also the founder of the Freedom Summer Collegiate program, which brings PhD students and university faculty to teach summer college-bridge courses for high school students at the Freedom Projects in Mississippi. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows program, serving as education programs manager for the National Book Foundation and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi in English and Southern Studies.
Writing
The archive of the Civil War era is filled with depictions of men's same-sex affections and intimacies. Across antebellum campaign biographies, proslavery fiction, published memoirs of Confederate veterans and Union prisoners of war, Civil War novels, newspaper accounts, and the war's historiography, homoerotic symbolism and narratives shaped the era's politics, as well as the meaning and memory of the war. The Civil War, in turn, shaped the development of homosexuality in the United States. In a book full of surprising insights, Andrew Donnelly uncovers this deeply consequential queer history at the heart of nineteenth-century national culture.
Confederate Sympathies focuses on the ways Northern white men imagined their relationship with white Southerners through narratives of same-sex affection. Assessing the cultural work of these narratives, Donnelly argues that male homoeroticism enabled proslavery coalition building among antebellum Democrats, fostered sympathy for the national retreat from Reconstruction, and contributed to the victories of Lost Cause ideology. Linking the era's political and cultural history to the history of homosexuality, Donnelly reveals that male homoeroticism was not inherently radical but rather cultivated political sympathy for slavery, the Confederacy, and white supremacy.
What do James’ depictions of young, white Southern men tell us about the changing sympathies of Northern white liberals to Reconstruction efforts?
What are the politics of scenes of voting in the postbellum novel?
“The War with Inflation and the Confederacy” [Review of Ways and Means] in Public Books (2022)
How did the Lincoln administration’s big, ambitious government projects both combat inflation and empower a laboring class against oligarchy?
How do Civil War novels and histories invoke the history of homosexuality to interpret the meaning of the war?
How did Stowe rewrite an archive of slavery’s sexual marketplace into one about the individual villains and victims of abuse?
“The Yankee Leviathan Collects Statistics: Federal Education Policy During Reconstruction” in Harvard Data Science Review (2021)
Why did the Reconstruction-era federal government believe that collecting education statistics would compel Southern states to educate Black citizens?
“The Organizer’s Mind of Martin Delany” in Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies (2021)
Was Delany’s support for the 1876 Democratic candidate for Governor consistent with his political thinking and strategy?
“Langston Hughes on DL” in College Literature (2017)
What is at stake in the literature classroom when we make a claim about Langston Hughes—his homosexuality—that he never made about himself?
What pedagogy is being proposed when we say that learning to read is a gift of freedom?
Teaching & Engaged Scholarship
I have more than a decade’s teaching experience with high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. At the University of Mississippi, I taught American literature survey courses, Southern Studies courses on Southern mythologies and gender & sexuality, and seminars on topics in 19th-century literature, such as “The Civil War & Sexuality” or “Law and Literature.” At St. Francis College in Brooklyn, I have taught introductory writing for college freshman. At Lakeside High School, in Lake Village, Arkansas, I taught 9th-grade, 11th-grade, and 12th-grade English.
For Freedom Summer Collegiate, I led the program for its first four years and have taught two Freedom Summer Collegiate courses, one on the Social Contract and one on the Fourteenth Amendment. I have continued to work with the Freedom Project Network, for which I currently serve as Treasurer. As a Mellon/ACLS Fellow at the National Book Foundation, I managed a number of NBF programs including Book Rich Environments, which works with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to distribute 200k books a year to families living in public housing.