Stephanie McCurry was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She attended college in Canada at the University of Western Ontario and moved to the United States for graduate school. She received her M.A. from the University of Rochester and her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is currently the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Columbia University. Before Columbia, Stephanie had been a member of the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006-2007 she was a visiting professor of history at Princeton University.

In addition to those faculty appointments, Stephanie has held a number of other positions. She has served as Director of the California History Project (a K-12 initiative) from 1996 to 1998, Director of the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University from 2002 to 2003, and (with David Blight) co-chaired the program committee of the Organization of American Historians in 2003. Since 2005 she has been an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. Over the years she has held a number of fellowships—from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Stephanie is the author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford University Press, 1995), Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press, 2010), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, and most recently, Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2019). She is also the author of articles and review essays that have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Women’s Review of Books.

At Columbia, Stephanie teaches a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in American, Southern and Women’s History, and on the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

Stephanie has two children, Saoirse and Declan McCurry Hahn. She lives in New York City.