Dr. Giesberg received her PhD from Boston College in 1997.  She has taught at Northern Arizona University, Villanova University, and the University of Pennsylvania, courses on the US Civil War, Nineteenth Century Women's History, and Reconstruction. 

Before teaching college students, Dr. Giesberg taught in the public schools in San Antonio, Texas.  She taught both high school and middle school, history, government, and economics.  In Arizona, Dr. Giesberg taught history and social studies teaching methods and served as Associate Director of the Martin-Springer Institute for Teaching the Holocaust, Tolerance and Humanitarian Values.  For the Institute, Dr. Giesberg coordinated seminars and in-service training for teachers, designed pre-service teacher curriculum around tolerance, developed and hosted summer institutes for teachers, and coordinated training seminars with Facing History and Ourselves and the Southern Poverty Law Center's tolerance pedagogy.

Dr. Giesberg is the author of two books examining the experiences of women in the Civil War North.  Her first book, Civil War Sisterhood: The U. S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition, followed the careers women leaders in the Sanitary Commission, arguing that the Civil War generation of women provided a crucial link between the local evangelical crusades of the early nineteenth century and the sweeping national reform and suffrage movements of the postwar period.  Dr. Giesberg's second book, "Army at Home:" Northern Women and the Civil War on the Home Front, tells the stories of women who tried to keep things from falling apart as war came home.  The book brings to life the forgotten stories of women who picked up the plows in the fields and the tools in the workshop, left home to find work or apply for aid, and traveled to urban hospitals and southern battlefields to retrieve loved ones.