Associate Professor of English, Penn State Brandywine

(Spring 2026)

Battlegrounds of Print: Materiality and the Civil War Soldier Press is the first scholarly monograph to examine Civil War soldier newspapers and the soldiers who printed them as an important cultural phenomenon and unique periodical culture within nineteenth-century American print culture. While scholars have documented the cultural output of the Civil War and journalism historians have detailed the changing conditions of the wartime press, few have explored the prodigious newspaper output of Civil War soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Soldiers printed and handwrote newspapers, periodicals, and camp gazettes during the war, some lasting a single handwritten issue in a prison camp while others ran regularly or intermittently for years, issued from multiple states as regiments moved from battle to battle. Drawing on the methods and insights of book history, periodical studies, and material culture studies, “Battlegrounds of Print” examines the material conditions of wartime printing, the mechanical and vernacular labor of soldier printers, and the journalistic interventions of soldier editors, showing how Civil War soldiers used the printing press and their newspapers as a literary battleground, contesting the meaning of the war and its impact on their relationship to each other and the fractured nation.