About Judy

Judith Giesberg (Judy) is an award-winning historian of the Civil War era, Lincoln Prize finalist, and the author and editor of six books.

In 2026, she received the Outstanding Faculty Research Award at Villanova University.

Her 2025 book, Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People for their Lost Family, follows ten freed people on epic searches for the loved ones lost in the slave trade. Drawing on a unique archive of Information Wanted and Lost Friends advertisements published in African American newspapers after the Civil War, each chapter is a microhistory that allows readers to feel what it was like to endure separation from family and kin, to be sustained for decades by an enduring love. 

Each individual’s story helps to highlight the book’s broader themes–violence, escape, standing up, naming names, legacy, and reunion.  Each one shows how freedom unfolded over many years as individuals tried to find one another and to lay claim to those they could not.

Last Seen was named one of NPR’s 2025 Books We Love and finalist for the 2026 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize!

Judy is also the author of Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition (2000), Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009), Emilie Davis's Civil War:  The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863-1865 (2014) and Sex and the Civil War:  Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of Modern Morality, (2017).  She co-edited, with Randall M. Miller, Women and the American Civil War:  North-South Counterpoints, (2018).

Committed to bringing history to a broad public, Judy has directed a number of popular digital humanities projects focusing on African American history, including Memorable Days:  The Emilie Davis Diaries, A Great Thing for Our People:  The Institute for Colored Youth During the Civil War, and Last Seen:  Finding Family After Slavery, that is collecting, digitizing, and transcribing information wanted ads taken out by formerly enslaved people looking for family members who were sold in the domestic slave trade.  These websites engage millions of people and are used widely in K-12 curriculum, public history programming, museum exhibits, and by professional and amateur genealogists.  

Judy is regularly appears on podcasts, writes op-eds, and engages audiences of Civil War buffs, genealogists, and teachers.

Before graduate school, Judy taught History and Social Studies in the Texas public schools. She received her PhD from Boston College and has taught in Boston, Flagstaff, and Philadelphia. 

Born a US Air Force “brat,” Judy lived in a number of places before settling down outside of Philadelphia with her husband, children, and two rescue dogs.