James Downs

Contact Jim Downs.

An assistant professor of history at Connecticut College, Jim Downs is a historian of the United States. His research examines the history of race and medicine in the 19th century.

His forthcoming manuscript, Sick from Freedom: The Deadly Consequences of Emancipation (Oxford University Press), tells the largely unknown story of how disease and sickness shaped the meaning of freedom for ex-slaves after the American Civil War.

In the summer and fall of 2010, Downs received the Mayers Fellowship from the Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA. In 2009, he was awarded a fellowship from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University; an Andrew Mellon fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a summer institute fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Downs teaches the following courses: The History of the United States in the Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction; Meditations on the History of the South; Narratives of Illness; An Introduction to the History of the United States; The History of Slavery and Emancipation in the Americas; The History and Politics of Racism and Public Health, and the Environmental History of the U.S. South.

His future research projects include a study of sexuality during the 19th century and an in-depth investigation of the international reaction to the American Civil War.

While a graduate student at Columbia, Jim Downs organized a number of conferences on the politics and history of social change. He has published two edited books based on the conference proceedings, Why We Write: The Politics and History of Writing for Social Change, Routledge, 2006, and Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism (co-edited with Jennifer Manion), Routledge, 2005.

Among his published articles are:

• "Are We All Precious?," 15 December 2009
• The Chronicle of Higher Education
•  “The Continuation of Slavery: The Experience of Disabled Slaves during Emancipation,” Disability Studies Quarterly, Summer 2008, Volume 28, No.3
• "Ailing Hospitals: Correspondence Reveals History of the Freedmen's Bureau Medical Division," Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration, Summer 2006, Vol. 38, No. 2
• "The Other Side of Freedom: Destitution, Disease, and Dependency Among Freedwomen and Their Children During and After the Civil War," in Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War, edited by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, Oxford University Press, 2006
• "Reconstructing the American South — After Katrina," History Today, January 2006, vol. 56, issue 1. pp. 16-18

Downs is a member of the American Historical Association, American Studies Association, Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine, Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association.

Visit the history department website.