Brian Schoen

Brian Schoen’s teaching and research focus on the political, social, economic, and intellectual history of the early United States from its early struggles through its near dissolution in the midst of the Civil War. His research examines how international developments shaped regional perception, politics, commitment or opposition to slavery, and relationships to and within the federal union. Schoen (pronounced SHANE) is the author of The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War, which was published by Johns Hopkins University Press and won the 2010 Southern Historical Association's Bennett H. Wall Award. He is co-editor (with Frank Towers and L. Diane Barnes) of The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress an Oxford University Press and has contributed to the Journal of the Early Republic and several edited collections dealing with politics, southern history, slavery, and the Civil War. He is currently working on several book chapters and articles examining the Civil War in a global context, and is beginning a new book-length study of the statecraft of the sectional and secession crises, events which had important and unstudied international dimensions.

He completed his undergraduate work at the University of Arkansas (B.A.) and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Before coming to Ohio University in 2006, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and taught at Georgetown University and California State University, Sacramento. His courses include the first half of the United States survey, the undergraduate research and writing seminar and graduate and undergraduate courses on the early US Republic and antebellum history, southern history, and the Civil War and its aftermath.

433 Bentley Annex
740-593-4351
schoen@ohio.edu