Liz Regosin finds the many ways in which she can affect students’ lives most rewarding. As both a professor and an administrator, those ways are many.

She is associate dean for faculty affairs, director of advising and associate professor of history.  It is in the latter capacity where she has the greatest contact with students.

“What I appreciate the most about teaching at SLU is the variety of contexts within which I have had the opportunity to work with students,” she says. “I have loved teaching everything from a First-Year Program course to the early U.S. history survey (1607-1877), to courses in African American History and the Civil War, and our senior research seminar. Since I've had the opportunity to work in a variety of capacities on campus, I feel able to understand and help my students more effectively. That interaction with students is what matters to me most and what I most enjoy.”

Prof. Regosin’s first book, Freedom's Promise, focused on the emancipation of slaves in the United States, particularly how the transition from slavery to freedom (“from slave to ‘citizen,’” as she puts it) affected former slaves' family lives.  “I used Civil War pension records of former slaves to examine this transition and found in them a treasure trove of wonderful materials documenting life under slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction,” she explains. In 2005, she and a colleague wrote an essay about the value of the Civil War pension files as historical source material for Prologue, the quarterly of the National Archives. They are in the final revision stages of a document reader of former slaves' Civil War pension files entitled Voices of Emancipation, due to be published next spring by NYU Press.