Yanoviak’s Black History Month presentation highlights inspirational Civil War nurse
Educator, historian and author Eileen Yanoviak, Ph.D., will delve into the inspirational story of 19th-century Union Army nurse Lucy Higgs Nichols during a special Black History Month presentation at Hanover College.
Yanoviak will discuss her book, “The Tenacious Nurse Nichols: An Unsung African American Civil War Hero.” Published in May 2025, the work examines the life of Nichols, who escaped from enslavement in Tennessee and joined the Union Army’s 23rd Regiment as a nurse during the American Civil War. Known among the soldiers as “Aunt Lucy,” Nichols – who later became a New Albany, Ind., resident – would earn the soldiers’ respect and, eventually, national notoriety for her perseverance toward opportunity and justice.
Yanoviak’s address will begin at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 18, at Hanover’s Joseph Wood Evans Memorial Special Collections and Archives Center in the Duggan Library. The event is open to the public, free of charge.
Yanoviak serves as program officer at the James Graham Brown Foundation in Louisville, Ky. She was formerly the director of the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Ind., where the story of Lucy Higgs Nichols is featured in an ongoing exhibition. She has spent 20 years working in cultural organizations, including the Josephine Sculpture Park in Frankfort, Ky., Louisville’s Speed Art Museum and KMAC Museum, and the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, Ark.
She has also had a parallel 20-year career in higher education, teaching art history and art education at Northern Kentucky University and art history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she was the former program administrator for the Donaghey Scholars Program.
Yanoviak holds a doctoral degree in art history from the University of Louisville with expertise in American art, landscape and environmental history. She earned bachelor’s degrees in art history and French, as well as a master’s degree in art history, from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Her research areas are diverse, encompassing American 19th-century Black history, environmental history, material culture and art history, as well as globally minded curriculum, contemporary art and French 19th-century landscape painting.
In addition to “The Tenacious Nurse Nichols: An Unsung African American Civil War Hero,” she is also the author of “Gaela Erwin: Reframing the Past”and was co-editor of “Formations of Identity: Landscape, Society, and Politics,” a collection of essays on landscapes.
The Black History Month presentation is sponsored by Hanover’s Haq Center for Cross-Cultural Education, Duggan Library, history department and English department.
