George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Joy M. Giguere is a Professor of History currently at Penn State York and will join the Department of History at University Park in Fall 2027. Her research on American commemorative culture centers on topics related to cemeteries, grave markers, public monuments and memorials, the politics of memory, mourning customs and material culture. She is the author of Pleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2024) and Characteristically American: Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival (University of Tennessee Press, 2014).

Professor Giguere has chaired national annual meetings of the Association for Gravestone Studies (2014 and 2025) and the International Society for Landscape, Place & Material Culture (2026), is a founder and co-chair of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Association for Gravestone Studies, and is the book reviews editor for Markers: The Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies.

Education:

PhD, History, University of Maine, 2009

MA, Historical Archaeology, University of Maine, 2005

BA, Anthropology and Music, Bowdoin College, 2003

Publications:

• Pleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Michigan Press, 2024).
• “The Crown Jewel of Kentucky: Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery,” book chapter in Kami Fletcher and Ashley Towle, eds., Grave History: Death, Race, and Gender in Southern Cemeteries (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2023).
• “Public Memory and Memorialization in Montgomery, Alabama,” PAST 45 (2022), 14-37.
• ““Palaces for the Dead”: The Mausoleum Craze in Gilded Age America,” Markers XXXVI: The Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies (2021), 120-159.
• ““Bowing to the God of Progress”: Automobiles, Urban Planning, & Greenville, South Carolina’s Confederate Monument,” Material Culture 52:1 (Spring 2020), 26-42.
• “Burial Politics on the Border: Funerals, Grave Decoration, and the Fashioning of Kentucky’s Civil War Identity,” Ohio Valley History 19:3 (Winter 2019), 19-44.
• “The (Im)Movable Monument: Identity, Space, & The Louisville Confederate Monument,” The Public Historian 41:4 (November 2019), 56-82.
• “Localism & Nationalism in the City of the Dead: The Rural Cemetery Movement in the Antebellum South,” The Journal of Southern History 84:4 (November 2018), 845-882.
• ““Too mean to live, and certainly in no fit condition to die”: Vandalism, Public Misbehavior, and the Rural Cemetery Movement,” Journal of the Early Republic 38:2 (July 2018), 293-324.
• “Variety there must be: Eclecticism, Taste, and the Nineteenth Century Rural Cemetery Landscape,” Markers XXXII: The Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies (2017), 82-104.
• “Young and Littlefield’s Folly: Fundraising, Confederate Memorialization, and the Construction of the Jefferson Davis Monument in Fairview, Kentucky, 1907–1924,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 115:1 (Winter 2017), 39-74.
• Characteristically American: Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival (University of Tennessee Press, 2014).
• “The Americanized Sphinx: Civil War Commemoration, Jacob Bigelow, and the Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery,” The Journal of the Civil War Era (March 2013), 62-84.
• “Virtuous Women, Useful Men, & Loving Children: Epitaph Language and the Construction of Gender and Class in Cumberland County, Maine, 1720-1820,” Markers XXIV: The Annual Journal for the Association for Gravestone Studies (2007), 1-23.

Selected Awards:

• James H. Burness Award for Excellence in Teaching, Penn State York, 2025-2026 AY
• SGA Student Appreciation Award, Penn State York, 2022
• Faculty Award for Research and Creative Accomplishment, Penn State York, 2019-2020 AY
• Research Fellowship Recipient, Kentucky Historical Society, 2014

Areas of Specialization:

Nineteenth Century U.S.