Leslie Schwalm, University of Iowa professor of history and chair of the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, has been named as a North American Teaching Partner with the Colored Conventions Project. She is one of only 24 teachers nationally working as a teaching partner with the project.

She is the author of A Hard Fight For We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (1997) and Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (2009). Her essays on gender, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, as well as race and the history of medicine, have appeared in edited collections and journals such as Slavery & Abolition, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, American Nineteenth Century History and Civil War History. 

In 2016, she collaborated with Playwright Margot Connelly on “Cross-Examined,” an original play based on the history of African American women in Iowa’s 19th-century civil rights movement, which was presented across Iowa in 2016-1028.  Her current book explores the expansion of racialized medicine and science among northern whites during and after the Civil War.  She is the co-director of the Iowa Colored Conventions Project satellite.