Christopher Conway presented two papers at the Western Literature Association Conference held at Fort Hall, Idaho in October of 2023: “Reuben Wu, Cosmic Photography, and the Deterritorialization of the American West,” and “An Immigrant Cartoonist’s Fight Against the Klan in Dallas, 1920-1924.” In July he presented research on the representation of the Holocaust in Mexican Comics at the Comics Studies Society annual conference, as well as the International Autobiography Association (IABA) conference in Warsaw, Poland.

Center director Sam W. Haynes was the recipient of the Otis Lock Award from the East Texas Historical Association, and the Tejano Book Award from the Tejano Genealogical Society of Austin for his book Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, The Struggle for Texas (Basic Books, 2022). He was also a finalist for the David J. Weber Prize awarded by the Western Historical Association and a finalist for the Writers League of Texas Book Award (nonfiction). He continues to work on his digital humanities project, Border Land: Interethnic Violence in Texas, 1821-1877.

Gerald D. Saxon is currently working on two book projects. The first is a biography of Texas empresario Sterling Clack Robertson (1785-1842), who came to Texas from Tennessee in 1830 and brought more than three hundred families into Mexican Texas. The second, with Dr. Sarah Rose of the History Department, is an oral biography of two Texas disability rights activists and spouses, Bob Kafka and Stephanie Thomas. Saxon also presented a lecture, “The Shape of Texas: Defining Texas Borders from Mexican Texas to Early Statehood, 1835-1850,” at the Virginia Garrett Lectures on the History of Cartography in October 2022. Saxon will be retiring at the end of August 2024, after thirty-eight years at UTA, where he served as a library administrator (including dean of the libraries) and as an associate professor of history.