Stephanie Cole will present a paper at the East Texas Historical Association Fall Meeting entitled “Racial Memory and a Rail: Oral Histories and the Role of Silence In The Lynching of John Henderson.” Along with Center Director Sam W. Haynes, she is planning a lecture series on LGBTQ+ History in the US West and Southwest. That series will occur as a part of the History Department’s Webb Lecture Series in April 2023.
Paul Conrad reports that his book, The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival, has been awarded the Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá award by the Historical Society of New Mexico. This award is for an outstanding publication in New Mexico or Southwest Borderlands history. He is now working on a new book project tentatively entitled, “The Interpreter Generation: Boarding School Alumni and Apache history in the 20th century.” This project looks at the role that Native young adults returning from U.S.-run boarding schools played within their communities as interpreters in multiple senses of the word. By linking their Indigenous knowledge with literacy and familiarity with U.S. colonialism, they helped support their families’ livelihoods; challenged the U.S. to provide reparations for past wrongs through compelling activism; and pressed outsiders to understand Apache history as more than just a story of militarism. Paul presented preliminary research drawn from this project at a history department brownbag, at the Western History Association annual meeting, and most recently at a symposium on the role of interpreters in history at Miami University in Ohio.
Christopher Conway and Antoinette Sol coedited the collection of critical essays titled The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). The book features essays on Argentinian, Canadian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Polish, and Spanish comic book Westerns, and on how they reflect local and transcultural historical processes. December of 2022 will see the publication of another of Conway’s editorial book projects, The Western in the Global Literary Imagination (Brill), which he coedited with Marek Paryz of the University of Warsaw, and David Rio of the University of the Basque Country. The collection contains 19 chapters about how literary and popular fiction from around the world have used the formula of the American Western to reflect local conditions or criticize U.S. exceptionalism and expansionism. The book features analyses of Israeli, South African, Kiwi, and Soviet representations of the American “frontier,” among many other nations and topics. Conway’s chapter for the volume is an analysis of magical realism and postcoloniality in Inland, a 2019 novel by the Serbian American novelist Téa Obreht. In the summer of 2022, Conway appeared on three episodes of the Six Gun Justice Western podcast, discussing his book Heroes of the Borderlands: The Western in Mexican Film, Comics, and Music, and The Comic Book Western (episode 200, episode 201, episode 202.)
Center director Sam W. Haynes’s new book, Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, the Struggle for Texas, was published by Basic Books in May. He was recently interviewed by the Austin American-Statesman (read it here), on the YouTube channel Clio the Muse (clip here), and Literary Hub’s Keen On podcast (episode here). In April he presented a paper, “Solely, Purely, Simply American: The Americanization of the Texas Revolution,” at the San Jacinto Symposium in Houston.
For the last few months Ben Huseman has been working on an exhibit and gallery guide titled “The Shifting Shapes of Early Texas: Highlights from UTA Libraries’ Special Collections” to accompany the Thirteenth Biennial Virginia Garrett Lectures to be held this October 6-8 in conjunction with the annual meeting of the International Map Collectors’ Society and the Texas Map Society. The exhibit will feature over 160 original rare maps, prints, books, broadsides, letters, paper money, and other documents dating from the 1500s to the 1850s, and it will be open from October 1 through January 2023. He also hopes soon to give details about a recent donation of over forty rare celestial maps and atlases dating primarily from the early eighteenth century.
Gerald Saxon presented “Virginia Garrett: A Personal Look at a Map Collector Extraordinaire” at the recent Texas Map Society Meeting, October 2, 2021. He also wrote an entry about the Berachah Home for the Handbook of Texas Online. He wrote two book reviews for scholarly journals, including reviews of Amon Carter: A Lone Star Life, by Brian A. Cervantez, for the New Mexico Historical Review, and Bluffing Texas Style, by Michael Vinson, for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He and Sarah Rose are currently working on an oral memoir of Bob Kafka and his wife Stephanie Thomas, both disability rights advocates in Texas. Saxon continues to work on his biography of Texas empresario Sterling Clack Robertson.
Charles Travis has been awarded tenure and promotion to the rank of Associate Professor of Geography with the Department of History effective September 1, 2022. In addition, his edited collection the Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities, will be published in September 2022, and includes three chapters authored and/or co-authored by Charles: “Cowboys, Cod, Climate and Conflict: Navigations in the Digital Environmental Humanities”; “The COVID-19 Testimonies Map: Representing Italian ‘Pandemic Space’ perceptions with Neogeography Technologies”, and “New Machines in the Garden: The Digital Environmental Humanities.” In addition, Charles recently published “The Morphology of Prometheus, Literary Geography and the Geo-Ethical Project,” in the journal Geosciences and continues research on a monograph project titled Deep Myths, Literature and Place: Spaces of the American West.
