Project Director,
Michael Ellis

Michael Ellis is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Missouri State University, where he taught for twenty-eight years. During that time, his research interests have included Old English lexicography and manuscript studies, as well as the study of Appalachian English and other dialects of British and American English. With roots in East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and Southwestern Virginia, Ellis has some ancestors who served in the Union Army and others who served in the Confederate Army. His 2013 book, North Carolina English, 1861-1865 (University of Tennessee Press), draws on more than 2,300 letters written by soldiers and their families during the Civil War era. These letters were among the first transcribed for the CACWL project. Ellis has also published articles in journals including Anglia, Appalachian Journal, American Speech (journal of the American Dialect Society), and the Journal of Linguistic Geography.

Project Director,
Michael Montgomery

Michael Montgomery was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina, where he taught English linguistics for nearly twenty years before retiring in 1999. As a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, with parents from the Deep South (Alabama and Mississippi), it was natural for his scholarly career to concentrate on Southern American English in general and on Appalachian English in particular. He was co-editor of the Language volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2007) and the author or editor of ten other books on varieties of Southern speech, including Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (2004). Though able to find only one member of his extended family who served during the war (a great-great-great uncle who was a surgeon for the Confederacy), his life-long passion for history led him on a twenty-year search for the roots of Appalachian English in Ireland and Scotland. That quest led to three books and to appointment as Honorary President of the Ulster-Scots Language Society. He passed in 2019.

Digital Project Director,
Stephen Berry

Stephen Berry is Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era at the University of Georgia and the author or editor of six books on nineteenth century America. Berry is co-editor, with Amy Murrell Taylor, of the UnCivil Wars series at UGA Press and co-director, with Claudio Saunt, of the Center for Virtual History. The Associate Academic Director for Digital Humanities at the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Berry also created and maintains the online project CSI:Dixie devoted to coroners' offices in the nineteenth century South.

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