Cynthia Wachtell

Contributor

Cynthia Wachtell is a research associate professor of American studies and director of the S. Daniel Abraham Honors program at Yeshiva University. She is editor of The Backwash of War: An Extraordinary American Nurse in World War I, an expanded edition of Ellen N. La Motte’s war writing, for which she wrote an extended introduction and the first biography of La Motte. She is also author of the path-breaking study War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914. She jointly earned her BA & MA, summa cum laude, from Yale University in American Studies and earned an AM in English and a PhD in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University.

History

A Woman Who Wrote About War: Recovering Ellen N. La Motte’s The Backwash of War

By Cynthia Wachtell • May 22, 2019

I love the old American spiritual “Down by the Riverside.” In fact, my first book borrows its title, War No More, from the song’s refrain. However, as a scholar of American antiwar writing, I have been studying war for a very long time. Sadly, my scholarly career has overlapped with America’s wars in Afghanistan and… Read more →