Nancy Bercaw is an Associate Professor of History and Southern Studies. She received a BA in History from Oberlin College and a MA and a PhD in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focus on race, gender, and South in the nineteenth century United States, and she is an active member of the UM Interdisciplinary Working Group on the Global South. She is the editor of Gender and the Southern Body Politic (University Press of Mississippi) and the author of Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of the Household in the Mississippi Delta 1861-1875 (University Press of Florida, 2003). Her current project, "Science and Citizenship: African American and Indian Bodies in Post-Emancipation America" analyzes the collections of the Army Medical Museum to investigate the biomedical reconstruction of race following the Civil War. She is the recipient of a Huntington Library NEH Long-Term Fellowship [2008-09], a Smithsonian Institution Senior Scholar Fellowship [2008-09], a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship [2000-2001], and a Smithsonian Institution Pre- Doctoral Fellowship [1992-93].

Recent undergraduate classes taught by Dr. Bercaw include: "Introduction to Southern Studies" [focusing on "New Southern Studies" and "Manners and Southern Culture,"] "History of the South to 1900," and "Imagining the South Today." Her graduate courses include" Emancipation and Reconstruction," "Making Race in America," "African American Women's History" "The Market Revolution," "Gender and Southern Culture" and "Emancipation and the Problem of Recovery."
Dr. Bercaw served as the Chair of the UM Commission on the Status of Women from 2006-2008 overseeing the "2007 UM Pay Equity and Advancement Report" and the "2008 Childcare Needs Survey Report." Both reports are available on the Commission's website (http://www.olemiss.edu/orgs/csw/).

In addition, Bercaw conducts K-12 teacher workshops on local history and sites of memory through the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation's Civil Rights Summits and UNESCO's Teaching the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Her presentations provide a lesson plan to take teachers and students into local archives to uncover and commemorate the slave experience in their counties.