Jim Downs

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-NEH Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine, which has been translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. His other books include Sick from Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation. He has edited seven anthologies, and published essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Lancet, LA Times. He is the editor of Civil War History, a partner at History Studio, co-editor of History in the Headlines, and Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia.  In 2022-23, Downs was a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African American Studies at Harvard and was elected to Society for American Historians, the Royal Historical Society in the UK, and the Executive Board of the Southern Historical Association. In 2015-16, he was a Mellon New Directions Fellow, which allowed him to return to graduate school, after tenure, and gain training in medical anthropology and epidemiology at Harvard. He earned his BA in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in American Studies from Columbia, and MPhil and PhD in History from Columbia.

Downs is currently at John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation