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FACULTY & STAFF

Dr. Mark Elliott

Contact Information

Email: mark.elliott@uncg.edu
Office: 2125 MHRA

Education

Ph.D., New York University, 2002
M.A., University of California, Riverside, 1993
B.A. in History/English, Duquesne University, 1991

Academic Positions

Associate Head of History Department, UNCG, 2019-present
Director of Graduate Studies, 2016-2019
Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008-present
Assistant Professor, Wagner College, 2002-2008

Research Interests

Abolitionism, Civil Rights, and Human Rights
Public History and Historical Memory
Civil War and Reconstruction
Constitutional, Political and Intellectual History
Transnational History

Current Project

My current book project, Liberator Nation: Human Rights and American Nationalism, 1830-1920, examines an influential strain of American nationalism that originated in abolitionist and antislavery circles and grew in influence after the Civil War. Infusing their nationalism with a discourse of universal, individual rights, these activists initiated a wave of rights-based movements that proliferated in the wake of emancipation. The exceptionalist belief that the United States would lead the world to embrace greater individual rights and democratic freedoms can be detected across a spectrum of political and social debates about American obligations both at home and abroad. Though contested, the politics of human rights in this period came to a head during the First World War with the phenomenon of Wilsonian internationalism and the backlash against it.

Courses Taught

HIS 210, Human Rights in Modern World History
HIS 211, The United States to 1865
HIS 212, The United States since 1865
HIS 217, The World in the Twentieth Century, 1900-1945
HIS 338, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Reunion, 1848-1896
HIS 339, War, Society, and Reform: America 1896-1945
HIS 510, Historiography
HIS 511A, Seminar in Historical Research and Writing: "Reconstruction in History and Memory"
HIS 526, The Civil War and Reconstruction: Selected Topics
HIS 701, Colloquium in American History before 1865
HIS 702, Colloquium in American History, 1865-Present
HIS 723, Selected Topics in 19th Century U.S. History
Courses taught at other universities listed on Vitae.

Selected Publications

"'Our God-Given Mission': The Legacy of Reconstruction and the Humanitarian Interventions of the 1890s" in Reconstruction and Empire: The Legacies of Abolition and Union Victory for an Imperial Age, edited by David Prior (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021): 161-191.
"Afterward" for Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée and edited by Robert Levine and Sandra Gustafson. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022).
"The Lessons of Reconstruction: Debating Race and Expansionism in the 1890s" in Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America's Most Tumultuous Era, edited by Carole Emberton & Bruce E. Baker. Louisiana State University Press, 2017.
Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée. Co-edited with John David Smith. Louisiana State University Press, 2010.
Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the CivilWar to Plessy v. Ferguson, Oxford University Press, 2006
Other publications listed on Vitae.

Selected Awards, Honors, and Fellowships

Summer Excellence Research Award, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2010.
Winner, Avery O. Craven Award, 2007. Organization of American Historians.
Finalist, Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, 2007. The George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War.
National Endowment for the Humanities, Long-Term Fellowship, 2006.
Lloyd Lewis Long-Term Fellowship in American History, Newberry Library, 2006.
Other awards listed on Vitae.

Ph.D. Dissertations Directed

Christopher W. Davis, "Cross Purposes: American Missionaries and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti." (2019)
Christine Flood, "The Arbiters of Compromise: Sectionalism, Unionism and Secessionism in Maryland and North Carolina" (2016)
James W. Hall, "The Last War of Honor: Manhood, Race, Gender, Class and Conscription in North Carolina during the First World War." (2019)
John Kaiser, "Judicial Knight Errant: Walter Clark and the Long Progressive Era in North Carolina" (2015).
Joseph Ross, "Judging Nuremberg: Creating the International Military Tribunal's Human Rights Legacy in America and Beyond." (2018)

Current Ph.D. Students

Matthew Hintz, "Sanitariums for the Lord: Faith Cure, Healing Homes, and their Institutionalization within the Medical and Healing Marketplace, 1870-1910."
Lynda Kellam, "Looking Across Empires: Sovereign Responsibility and the roots of 'The Responsibility to Protect' in Nineteenth Century Britain and the United States"

Recent Master's Students Advised

Dannette Sharpley, "Faith and Feminism in the Black Atlantic: Mary Prince, Elizabeth Hart Thwaites, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper." (2022).
Ron Adams, "The Machine and the Men Who Fought It: Fusion and Republican Failure in North Carolina" (2021).
Peter D'Arpa, "'A Most Useful Purpose': Anti-Imperialist Memory of the Spanish-American War” (2016).
Jennifer Rossi, "Culturing Fear: Mothers, Magazines, and the Discourse of Disease" (2015).
Elizabeth McFayden, "Paved with Good Intentions: Efficiency and Disability in the Progressive Era" (2014).
Meghan Reed, "The Civilized Being and the Real Savage: Reconstructing Race in Hampton, Virginia" (2014).
Josh Artrip, "The Conservative Press and Greensboro During Reconstruction" (2014).
Rebecca Adams, "Love is a War: Southern Courtship and Romance Transformed by the American Civil War" (2013).
Elizabeth Baker, "The Untold Story: Slavery and Black History at Hampden-Sydney College" (2013).
Kenneth Surles, "Boston Marriage: Rethinking the History of Marriage and Same-Sex Relationships in Post-Victorian America" (2013).