Faculty fellow Paul Conrad has been continuing work this year on his book examining Native American boarding school survivors and the role they played within their communities. He has presented research drawn from this project at the Western History Association annual meeting, and has had a book chapter accepted in a forthcoming volume on the role of interpreters in the history of the American West. He has also joined the board of the new Journal of Texas History and looks forward to help foster further publications on the Indigenous history of Texas in this role.
Faculty fellow Christopher Conway collaborated with Marek Paryz and David Rio on a book proposal for an anthology of over thirty critical essays on transnational American westerns from around the world. The proposal is currently under review at a major press. In the Fall of 2024, he was invited to join an international research group funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MCIU), titled “Otra del (otro) Oeste: Más allá del/los género(s) y las naciones.” [(An)other Western Story: Beyond Genres, Gender, Nations.]
Center Director Sam W. Haynes received the University Research Award from President Cowley in 2024 for his recent book, Unsettled Land: From Revolution to Republic, The Struggle for Texas. He was also awarded a 2024 research fellowship from the Portal to Texas History, University of North Texas, for his ongoing work on one of the Center’s digital humanities projects, “Texas in Turmoil: Mapping Interethnic Violence, 1821-1879.”
Faculty fellow Sonia Kania was awarded a Supplemental Faculty Research Grant in the spring of 2024 from UTA’s McDowell Center for Global Studies. These funds supported her archival research at the Austrian National Library, where she consulted the manuscript containing Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his travails in North America. Dr. Kania is currently working on a digital edition of the text. In July 2024, Dr. Kania presented with a colleague at the Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española, where they discussed their philological research on Fray Marcos de Niza’s account of his expedition to the Seven Cities of Cíbola in 1539.
Faculty fellow Charles B. Travis published an article, “Blood Meridian’s Chronotopic Gates: Reading Cormac McCarthy through the Lens of a Literary-Historical GIS,” in the October 2023 edition of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts. Dr. Travis also presented his work at this year’s American Historical Association meeting in New York City in January, where he participated in the Digital Project Showcase to discuss his Cormac McCarthy project. Charlie also chaired a panel at the AHA meeting, “Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and History: Mapping, Spatial Modeling, and the Visual Chronicling of Period and Place,” in which he discussed his ongoing GIS and historical mapping projects.
