Joan Waugh

Joan Waugh is an American historian and academic, on the faculty at UCLA. She specializes in the 19th-century American history, and is an expert on the American Civil War, the aftermath and Gilded Age.

She has written books such as U.S. Grant, American Hero, American Myth. Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowelland (1998), The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (2004) and The American War: A History of the Civil War Era (2015), co-authored with Gary W. Gallagher. Waugh has also written essays on Civil war topics, including Ulysses Grant, whom she has commented critically on.

Waugh has given numerous lectures at universities, and along with Gallagher she has been involved in conferences on the Civil War at the Huntington Library.