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David Silkenat is the Richard J. Milbauer Chair in Southern History. A historian of the American South, Silkenat’s work focuses on the long Civil War era, and bridges social, cultural, environmental, political, and military history.
He is the author of four monographs. His most recent book, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South (OUP, 2022), was a finalist for the Frederick Douglass Prize. He is also the author of Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War (UNC Press, 2019), a finalist for the Abraham Lincoln Prize. His first two books, Driven From Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis (UGA Press, 2015) and Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina (UNC Press, 2011), both received the North Caroliniana Society Book Prize.
He has contributed chapters to the Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War and the Cambridge History of the American Civil War, and published articles in American Nineteenth Century, the North Carolina Historical Review, and the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. He has served as the Chair of the Scottish Association for the Study of America (2018-22), on the editorial boards of Journal of the Civil War Era and American Nineteenth Century History, and on the executive committee of the Society of Civil War Historians.
Prior to joining the University of Florida, Silkenat was Professor of United States History at the University of Edinburgh (2013-2024) and Assistant Professor of History and Education at North Dakota State University (2008-2013). He also taught at Episcopal High School in Jacksonville (1999-2003). He received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and his doctorate from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.