Summer 2012 Teacher Institutes

H. W. Brands

H. W. Brands (keynote speaker) was born in Oregon, went to college in California, worked as a traveling salesman in a territory that spanned the American West, and taught high school for ten years before becoming a college professor. He is currently the Dickson, Allen, Anderson Centennial Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, and is the author of The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, among many other books. Both The First American and his biography of Franklin Roosevelt, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr.

H. W. Brands

Albert S. Broussard

Albert S. Broussard is professor of history at Texas A&M University, where he has taught since 1985, and a former Humanities Texas board member. Broussard has published six books: Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954; African American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853–1963; American History: The Early Years to 1877; The American Republic Since 1877; and The American Vision. His most recent book, published in 2012 by Harlan Davidson, is Expectations of Equality: A History of Black Westerners. He earned his BA from Stanford University and his MA and PhD from Duke University. He is past president of the Oral History Association; he received a Distinguished Teaching Award from Texas A&M University in 1997 and presented the University Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 2000. Broussard recently completed a history of African Americans in the American West from 1500 to the present for Harlan Davidson.

Albert S. Broussard.

Erica M. Bsumek

Erika M. Bsumek is associate professor of history at The University of Texas at Austin, where she specializes in Native American and Western U.S. history. She is the author of Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940, as well as a number of other articles about Native Americans, consumerism, and the West. Her current research projects include an examination of how large-scale infrastructure projects restructured space—and social relations in the process—throughout the arid West.

Erica M. Bsumek.

Robert M. Citino

Robert M. Citino is one of America’s most distinguished military historians. He is the author of nine books, including The German Way of War (2005) and Death of the Wehrmacht (2007), both of which were main selections of the History Book Club and the Military Book Club. His book Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm (2004) was the winner of both the American Historical Association’s Paul M. Birdsall Prize for best book of the year in military and strategic history and the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award. His ninth book, The Wehrmacht Retreats, was released in early 2012. During the 2008–09 academic year, he served as the Charles Boal Ewing Visiting Professor of Military History at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY. He received his PhD from Indiana University.

Robert M. Citino.

Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson is an expert in late nineteenth-century America. She is the author of several books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, including, most recently, West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (Yale, 2007), and Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre (Basic, 2010). A professor at Boston College, Richardson’s last three books were selected by the History Book Club; West from Appomattox was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. Richardson is now finishing a history of the Republican Party, which examines the party from its inception to 2008. It will be published in 2013.

Heather Cox Richardson.

Crista DeLuzio

Crista DeLuzio received her PhD from Brown University and joined the faculty at SMU in 2000. Her research and teaching specialties include the history of women and gender in the United States, the history of the family, and the history of childhood. She is the author of Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought; the editor of Women’s Rights: People and Perspectives; and the coeditor of On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American Southwest, which will be published by the University of California Press in July 2012. Her current research focuses on sibling relationships in American culture at the turn of the 20th century. Professor DeLuzio has been recognized with several teaching awards at SMU, including the Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor Award, the Rotunda Outstanding Professor Award, and the Deshner Teaching Award from the Women’s and Gender Studies Council.

Crista DeLuzio.

Neil Foley

Neil Foley is professor of history at The University of Texas at Austin. His current research centers on the changing constructions of race, citizenship, and transnational identity in the Borderlands, Mexico, and the American West; Mexican immigration; and comparative civil rights politics of African Americans and Mexican Americans. He is the author of The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas (University of California Press, 1997); Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Harvard, 2010), and Latino USA: Mexicans and the Remaking of America (forthcoming, Harvard, 2012). In June, Professor Foley will become the Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Chair of History in the Clements Department of History at Southern Methodist University.

Neil Foley.

Ignacio M. García

Ignacio M. García is the Lemuel Hardison Redd Jr. Professor of Western & Latino History at Brigham Young University. He is the author of five books on Chicano politics and civil rights and is currently working on a sixth book, a community and sports history of a high school in San Antonio, Texas, during the World War II years. García was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and raised in San Antonio, Texas. He received his BA at what was formerly known as Texas A&I University and received his PhD at the University of Arizona. He is a former Fulbright scholar and newspaper and magazine journalist.

Ignacio M. García.

Michael L. Gillette

Michael L. Gillette has been Humanities Texas’s executive director since 2003. His former positions include directing the LBJ Library’s Oral History Program from 1976 to 1991 and serving as director of the Center for Legislative Archives from 1991 to 2003, with responsibility for the official records of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives at the National Archives. Gillette serves on the advisory board of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, the board of directors of the Congressional Education Foundation, and the board of visitors of Southwestern University. He is a member of the Philosophical Society of Texas and served as its president in 2009. His previous affiliations include the board of directors of the Everett Dirksen Congressional Leadership Center and the Law Library of Congress’s National Digital Library Program. Gillette is the author of Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History and editor of Texas in Transition. He received his BA in government and his PhD in history from The University of Texas at Austin.

Michael L. Gillette.

David M. Kennedy

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus and Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. He received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1988. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2000 for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. He received an AB in history from Stanford University and his MA and PhD from Yale University. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. Freedom from Fear recounts the history of the United States in the two great crises of the Great Depression and World War II.

David M. Kennedy.

Allen Matusow

Allen Matusow is the academic affairs director at the Baker Institute and the William Gaines Twyman Professor of History at Rice University. He joined the Rice faculty in 1963 and served as the dean of humanities from 1981 to 1995. He specializes in twentieth-century U.S. history and has written or edited five books, including The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s and Nixon's Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes. Matusow is in the early stages of a book on the presidency of Ronald Reagan and continues to teach history courses in conjunction with his associate director responsibilities.

Allen Matusow.

David Oshinsky

David Oshinsky is the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at The University of Texas at Austin. Oshinsky’s book Polio: An American Story won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Hoover Presidential Book Award in 2006. His other books include the Hardeman Prize-winning A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (2005), and the Robert Kennedy Prize-winning Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1997). His articles and reviews appear regularly in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

David Oshinsky.

Nicole A. Waligora-Davis

Nicole A. Waligora-Davis is associate professor of English at Rice University. She specializes in African American and American literature and culture, critical race theory, immigration studies, African American intellectual history, and black internationalism. She is the author of Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2011), a book that underscores the substantive legal, social, and political consequences of the state’s persistent misrepresentation of black citizens as aliens and refugees. An associate editor of the award-winning Remembering Jim Crow (New Press, 2001), Waligora-Davis’s essays have appeared in Centennial Review, African American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Mississippi Quarterly, the Cambridge History of African American Literature, and the Cambridge Companion to American Literature After 1945.  She is currently engaged in a new book-length study, The Murder Book: Race, Forensics, and the Value of Black Life.

Nicole A. Waligora-Davis.