Frances Clarke received her doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 2002 and then worked for a year as a research associate for the American Historical Association. She then took up a lectureship in University of Sydney’s History Department. Since that time, she has taught courses on a range of topics in American history—from the colonial era through the twentieth century. Her research specialties include the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era; war, memory, and trauma; the history of childhood; and the social, legal, political, and cultural history of nineteenth century America. Her first book, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), won the Australian Historical Association’s biennial Hancock Prize for the best first book in any field of history. In 2023, Clarke and Professor Rebecca Jo Plant (University of California, San Diego) completed research in the enlistment age in America from the Revolution to the turn of the 20th century by publishing Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), which won the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.
Frances M. Clarke
