Sam Haynes, Director of the Center for Southwestern Studies, will deliver a talk entitled, “Monument and Memory in Texas History: From Sacred Site to Martial Symbol,” at the San Jacinto Symposium in April 2021. He is currently finishing his book manuscript, Border Land: The Struggle for Texas, for Basic Books. He continues to manage and develop content for the Center’s Continent Divided: The US-Mexico War website.
Stephanie Cole is currently associate professor of history. Her expertise is in women’s history, and over the past year, a centennial of the 19th Amendment granting suffrage, has spoken at several commemorative events. She also teaches about and has published on changes in gender, race, sex and marriage in the United States. Her current research project–a spectacle lynching that occurred in Corsicana, Texas, in 1901–brings together her interest in the southwest region with those issues. A longtime advocate of getting good history into the public realm, she currently sits on the boards of the Texas State Historical Association, the Women of the Southwest Archives at SMU, and the Sewanee Project on Race and Reconciliation.
Paul Conrad is happy to report that he received a positive decision on tenure recently and will soon be an associate professor. His book The Apache Diaspora will be released in May, and he also has some fun articles in progress, including several collaborations with colleagues in Social Work.
Christopher Conway’s “Once Upon a Time on the Border: Immigration and Comic Book Westerns in Mexico” has just appeared in the book Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, edited by Nhora Lucía Serrano (Routledge, 2021). Research in progress includes a coedited book of essays on comic book Westerns and an article on Téa Obreht’s “Camel” Western Inland (2019).
Ben Huseman, Faculty Fellow Ex Officio, is currently working on a forthcoming exhibit “Searching for Africa: the Africa Maps of Dr. Jack Franke and UTA Special Collections” scheduled this fall in conjunction with the Virginia Garrett Lectures on the History of Cartography to be held on September 30 and October 1-2. He continues to assist with the Center for Southwest Studies website “A Continent Divided.”
Erin Murrah-Mandril received tenure in the UTA English Department and will be an Associate Professor beginning fall 2021. Her book, In the Mean Time: Temporal Colonization and the Mexican American Literary Tradition, was published in 2020 by the University of Nebraska Press. You can read an interview about the book in the spring 2020 issue of Fronteras. Dr. Murrah-Mandril also published the essay “Undocumented Learning Outcomes and Cyber Coyotes: Teaching Ethnic Studies in the Online Classroom” in the edited collection Teaching Race in Perilous Times, edited by Jason E. Cohen, Sharon D. Raynor, and Dwayne A Mack. She also presented a paper about her new project, which studies Latina birth culture in the early 20th-century, at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual conference in April 2021.
Gerald D. Saxon continues to work on a biography of Texas empresario Sterling Clack Robertson (1785-1842), who came to Texas from Tennessee in 1830. The pandemic has delayed a needed trip to Nashville to complete the research for the biography. His most recent book is an edited volume with Sam Haynes titled Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution, published by Texas A&M University Press in 2015. He was recently co-principal investigator of a Summerlee Foundation Grant, Building the Texas Disability History Collection (Stage 2), $11,890. The grant funds are being used to build the Texas Disability History Collection housed in Special Collections of the University of Texas at Arlington Library. In February of 2020, he presented a paper titled “Rethinking Texas History Via Disability History” at the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association.
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