Leah Richier Visiting Assistant Professor, 2017-2018
Education
Ph.D., University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 2017
B.A., Agnes Scott College, Degree in History
Research
U.S. history, 19th U.S. cultural and social history, areas of specialization on gender, sex, sexuality, race, disability, and death
Selected Publications
"Living and Dying in the Civil War: A Sensory History," co-authored with Dr. Stephen Berry, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Forthcoming).
"Diagnosing Dixie: What Asylum Records Say about Post-Civil War South Carolina," The Proceedings, South Carolina Historical Association (March 2017).
“Soldier Suicides,” The SAGE Encyclopedia of War (October 2016).
Review of Katy Meier’s Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2013.) Civil War History (March 2015).
“Race Riots” and “William Jennings Bryan and the Gold Standard,” The American Yawp: A Free, Online, Collaboratively Built American History Textbook (October 2014).
Review of Richard Serrano’s The Last of the Blue and Grey (Smithsonian Books, 2013.) The Civil War Monitor (October 2013).
“Civil War Cemeteries,” The Civil War in Georgia: A New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion (September 2011).
Current Research
Professor Richier's research interests lie in 19th century social and cultural, particularly emphasizing gender, race, mental illness, and death around the Civil War era. Her current research project stems from her dissertation entitled "If He Should Die: The Plight of Patients and Their Families at the Georgia and South Carolina Lunatic Asylums during the 1860s." The project delves into the earliest era of the Georgia Lunatic Asylum in Milledgeville, Georgia, from 1842 to 1879 under the leadership of its first superintendent, Dr. Thomas A. Green, whose daughter married an asylum patient. She studies the intimate experience of the institution's patients and their families from the emergence of mental illness through their deaths either at home or the asylum, including fathers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from the Civil War, mothers struggling with puerperal insanity (mental illness related to pregnancy and childbirth), and children with intellectual disabilities.