Jonathan Sarris, 2025–26

Jonathan Sarris has taught US history at North Carolina Wesleyan University in Rocky Mount, North Carolina since 2004. He holds a PhD and MA in history from the University of Georgia, and a BA in history from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

Dr. Sarris’s scholarship has chiefly focused on the social history of the Civil War South. His book, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (University of Virginia Press, 2006), studied divided loyalties in the Appalachian counties of northern Georgia and revealed the fractures below the surface of the white southern Confederate identity. Recently, he has shifted scholarly focus to the US colonization of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War, which topic is the focus of his current book project, The Birth of an Empire: The United States Debates Philippines Annexation, 1898–1900 (coauthored with Ms. Jessica Brabble of the College of William and Mary). Sarris lives in Greenville, North Carolina with his family.

Selected Publications

• Sarris, Jonathan. A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.
• Sarris, Jonathan. “Anatomy of an Atrocity: The Madden Branch Massacre and the Guerrilla War in North Georgia, 1861–1865.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 77, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 679–710.
• Sarris, Jonathan. “The Assassin’s Accomplices: Guilt, Innocence and Redemption in Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) and The Conspirator (2010).” In Writing History with Lightning: Representations of 19th Century America on Film, edited by Matthew Hulbert and John Inscoe, 105–125. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019.
• Sarris, Jonathan. “‘Shot For Being Bushwhackers’: Guerrilla War and Extralegal Violence in a North Georgia Community, 1862–1865.” In Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Homefront, edited by Daniel E. Sutherland, 31–44. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999.
• Sarris, Jonathan. “An Execution in Lumpkin County: Localized Loyalties in North Georgia’s Civil War.” In The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, edited by Kenneth Noe and Shannon Wilson, 131–157. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.