Ella Starkman-Hynes

Research interests:

19th and 20th century United States; United States cultural history; Civil War and Reconstruction

Bio:

Ella Starkman-Hynes is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University, studying historical memory and popular culture in the 19th and 20th century United States. Ella’s dissertation project examines the cultural and intellectual legacies of the American Civil War through counterfactuals (or “alternate histories”) that imagine what might have happened if the South had won.

Ella has a Bachelor’s degree in History and Philosophy from McGill University, and a Master’s degree in History from Yale. In 2026, she was awarded a Prize Teaching Fellowship for her work as a Teaching Fellow on the DeVane Lectures.

Ella’s work has been published in Muster, the Journal of the Civil War Era’s blog:

Poetry Not Yet Written: Revisiting Glory Thirty Years Later

A Mistaken Form of Trust: Ken Burns’s The Civil War at Thirty

Ella’s work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.