Dr Robin Bates is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the RAI, where he works on the Leverhulme Trust project Conservatisms in the Age of Revolutions, 1830-1877. He is an historian of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era with a particular interest in the changing nature of, and ideas about, governance during the late nineteenth century. His PhD research, completed at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Gary Gerstle in 2023 and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), presents a new history of the Civil War pension system, the enormous system of military benefits established for veterans of the Union Army, and he is currently preparing a manuscript of his book, For Him Who Bore the Battle: The Civil War Pension System and the Politics of Veterans’ Benefits in Gilded Age America, for submission to the University of North Carolina Press.
Prior to joining the RAI, Rob spent a year as John W. Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. He has also held the Frank Knox Fellowship at Harvard University and won additional research funding from the AHRC, American Historical Association, the British American Nineteenth-Century Historians (BrANCH), the Dirksen Congressional Research Center, Durham University, Queens’ College (Cambridge), the New York Public Library, and the Sara Norton Trust, among others. He has also taught at Durham University and the University of Warwick, and presented research to the Congressional Research Service in Washington, D.C.
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Selected Publications
‘Mr. Bentley Goes to Washington: Reform, Reaction, and Competing Conceptions of Government in the Civil War Pension System,’ Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 24 (2025), 249-276.
‘Government by Improvisation? Towards a New History of the Nineteenth-Century American State,’ Journal of Policy History 33 (July 2021), 287-316.
‘The Ideal Home of the South: The R.E. Lee Camp Confederate Soldiers’ Home and the Institutionalization of Confederate Veterans in Virginia,’ American Nineteenth-Century History 17 (May 2016), 23-41.
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