She is a native of Luray and earned her undergate and graduate degrees at the University of Virginia. Her doctoral dissertation became her first book, "Burying the Dead, But Not the Past: Ladies Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause." Her Bottimore Lecture will be on the subject of her recently-published second book, "Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation," a volume in the prestigious Littlefield series on the History of the Civil War Era. University of Richmond, Jepson Hall