Division Vice Chair

Rebecca Jo Plant (History)

Rebecca Jo Plant is a Professor of History and a recipient of the Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award. She grew up in Kansas City, attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and later moved to Baltimore to pursue a PhD at Johns Hopkins University. After teaching for two years at Vanderbilt University, she arrived at UC San Diego in 2002. Rebecca’s research interests focus broadly on family history and the ramifications of war in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Her most recent book, Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford University, 2023), coauthored with France M. Clarke (University of Sydney), won the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the Grace Abbott Book Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth. She was previously president of the Western Association of Women Historians and coeditor and editor of Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000. At UC San Diego, she served on and chaired the Committee on Admissions and Arts CAP and been a member of Senate Council, the Committee on Faculty Welfare, the Committee on Extended Studies and Public Service, and the Committee on Library, as well as serving on the Executive Board and as Academic Senate Representative for Muir College.