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Books and Job Placements of Some University of Houston History Ph.D.s, 1990’s-2000’s

Austin Allen (Ph.D. 2001, Robert Palmer) is an expert in American legal and constitutional history. He currently is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Downtown campus. His book Imposing Sovereignty, Containing Slavery: Jacksonian Jurisprudence and the Origins of the Dred Scott Case will be forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press late in 2005 or early in 2006.

Elizabeth (‘Scout’) Blum (Ph.D. 2000, Martin Melosi) is an Associate Professor of History at Troy State University in Troy, Alabama. She is an expert in environmental history, focusing on women’s environmental activism.

Mike Botson (Ph.D. 1997, Joe Pratt) teaches history at the Northwest Campus of Houston Community College, where he was named teacher of the year in 2004. His parallel history of union organization and race relations at the Hughes Tool Corporation (headquartered in Houston) is forthcoming from Texas A&M University Press.

Mark Carroll (Ph.D. 1997, Robert Palmer) is an American legal historian, focusing on the intersections of law and society. He published Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823-1860 (University of Texas Press) in 2001. In 2004, he was named the Seiler Fellow by the Missouri Supreme Court Historical Society, and is at work on a new book, Saving Gomorrah, which deals with the relationship of law, religion, political culture, and society in the Trans-Mississippi South-West, during the early 19th century. He is now an Associate Professor in the History Department of the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Norman Caulfield (Ph.D. 1990, John Mason Hart) is Professor of History at Fort Hays State University in Kansas, where he teaches Mexican and Latin American history. His book, Mexican Workers and the State: From the Porfiriato to NAFTA was published by Texas Christian University Press in 1998, and he is also the author of two award-winning articles in his field. He is currently on leave from the university to serve as the Acting Research Director of the Commission for Labor Cooperation, a commission established as part of the NAFTA agreement.

Christopher Casteneda (Ph.D. 1990, Joe Pratt and Martin Melosi) recently became chair of the history department at California State University, Sacramento, where he is a professor of history and directs the joint Ph.D. program in public history at CSUS and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also serves on the editorial board of The Public Historian. His numerous publications include a history of the building of the first natural gas trunklines from the southwest to the East, histories of the Texas Eastern Corporation and Panhandle Energy, a dual biography of Herman and George R. Brown, and a general history of the natural gas industry. He is a leading historian of the U.S. natural gas industry.

Charles Closman (Ph.D. 2003, Hannah Decker) is an expert in the environmental history of Europe. His dissertation investigated the environmental history of Hamburg, Germany, and how politics affected environmental decision-making. In 2003-4 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. He is now Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

Rebecca Durrer (Ph.D. 2000, Karl Ittmann) specializes in the history of the British empire, having done her doctoral research on British colonization of New Zealand. While a doctoral candidate, she was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to New Zealand. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Social Sciences at Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri.

Leigh Fought (Ph.D. 2000, Richard Blackett) is Assistant Editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers project at Purdue University in Indianapolis, Indiana. She has also worked on the Margaret Sanger Papers project, based at New York University. Her monograph, Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa S. McCord, 1810-79, was published by the University of Missouri Press in 2003.

Karen Guenther (Ph.D. 1994, James Kirby Martin) is a tenured Associate Professor of History at Mansfield University in north-central Pennsylvania, where she also recently assumed duties as department chair in History and Political Science. Karen is likewise chairing the History in Educational Institutions Committee of the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, and she recently served as Scholar in Residence at the Conrad Weiser Homestead. Recent articles have appeared in Pennsylvania History and Quaker History among other scholarly outlets, and she has completed a book about Quakers on the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania frontier that will soon be published by Susquehanna University Press. She is also finishing a manuscript on the history of sports and play in Pennsylvania.

Jonathan Hook (Ph.D. 1996, Martin Melosi) is an expert in the field of American Indian history. His dissertation investigated cultural transformation among the Alabama-Coushatta tribe of Texas; in 1997 Texas A & M University Press published his book entitled The Alabama-Coushatta Indians. After several years as President of the American Indian Resource Center in San Antonio, Texas, he is now the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 6 Office of Environmental Justice and Tribal Affairs in Dallas.

William Kellar (Ph.D. 1994, Linda Reed) is Executive Director of the Scholars' Community, the largest retention program at the University of Houston. He is an affiliated faculty member with the history department at UH, where he teaches graduate courses the public history program. His book Make Haste Slowly is a history of the desegregation of the Houston Independent School District. He also has published histories of the Service Corporation International (with Elizabeth O'Kane Lipartito) and Kelsey- Siebold. His edited volume of the memoir of Dr. Frederick C. Elliott, The Birth of the Texas Medical Center, is forthcoming from Texas A & M University Press.

Joyce Kievit (Ph.D. 2002, Steven Mintz) is an expert in the field of American Indian history; her dissertation, entitled “Trail of Tears to Veil of Tears”, investigated the impact of removal on reconstruction in Indian Territory. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the History Department of Arizona State University, where she is the managing editor of the H-AmIndian project, which includes an edited discussion list for scholars, academicians, and Native peoples to consider the history, culture, ideas and events relating to indigenous peoples from the North Pole to Mexico.

Irving Levinson (Ph.D. 2002, John Mason Hart) is currently a Lecturer in History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. A Mexican historian, his book on the US war in Mexico is forthcoming from Texas Christian University Press in May 2005. While at UH, he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to conduct his research in Mexico.

James McCaffrey (Ph.D. 1990, Joseph Glatthaar) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston-Downtown. His book, Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848 was published by New York University Press in 1992. He also edited "Surrounded by Dangers of All Kinds": The Mexican War Letters of Lieutenant Theodore Laidley (North Texas University Press, 1997).

J. Kent McGaughy (Ph.D. 1997, James Kirby Martin), has published his first book, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: A Portrait of an American Revolutionary (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). This study has generated media interest in Lee and has resulted in Kent making two appearances on the C-Span network. Kent teaches at the Northwest campus of Houston Community College, where he founded and currently directs the Honors Program.

Ernest Obadele-Starks (Ph.D. 1996, Joe Pratt) is an Associate Professor at Texas A & M University. An expert in southern labor history, he is author of Black Unionism in the Industrial South (Texas A & M University Press, 2000) and numerous scholarly articles. He is currently completing work on a book on the illegal slave trade in the southwestern United States.

Victoria Pasley (Ph.D. 1999, Thomas O’Brien) is an expert in Caribbean and African Diaspora studies. After completing her degree in history, she went on to take an M.A. in Film and Video Studies at American University in Washington, DC. She spent three years as an Assistant Professor at Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, but moved in 2004 to become Assistant Professor of History at Clayton College and State University in Morrow, Georgia, near Atlanta.

Bernadette Pruitt (Ph.D. 2001, Linda Reed) is an Assistant Professor of History at Sam Houston State University, where she teaches American history and African American history. Her dissertation, which she is currently revising for publication, traces the migration of African Americans from East Texas to the Houston area.

Cristina Rivera-Garza (Ph.D. 1995, John Mason Hart) is both an historian and a novelist. As an historian, she has focused her research on poor women in Mexico, medicine, and disease. Some of her academic articles are included in the Hispanic American Historical Review, and The Journal of the History of Medicine , among others. For her literary work, she won the prestigious 2002 sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Prize for her novel Nadie me verá llorar (2000), recently translated into English as No One Will See Me Cry. Carlos Fuentes said of her work, "No One Will See Me Cry is one of the most beautiful and perturbing novels every written in Mexico." Her books have won six of the most respected literary awards in Mexico and Latin America. She is currently a tenured associate professor of Mexican history at San Diego State University and head of the Creative Writing (narrative) Program at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Krisztina Robert (Ph.D. 1998, Karl Ittmann) is an expert on gender and culture in modern Britain. After several years as an independent scholar in England, she has recently gained a permanent appointment as Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, on the outskirts of London.

Charles F. Robinson II (Ph.D. 1997, Steven Mintz) is a leading young scholar on race relations in the South. His Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South, published by the University of Arkansas Press, examines the selective enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws in the South from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression. In a review of the book, James Campbell writes that "Dangerous Liaisons" is "the most important book on the actual working of anti-miscegenation law ever written...." Professor Robinson is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

Terry Rugeley (Ph.D. 1992, John Mason Hart) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, where he teaches Mexican and Latin American history. Among his publications are Yucatan's Maya Peasantry and the Origins of Caste War (University of Texas Press, 1996) and Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion & Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800-1876 (University of Texas Press, 2001).

Mark Saka (Ph.D. 1995, John Mason Hart) is a tenured Associate Professor of History at Sul Ross Sate University in Alpine, Texas, near Big Bend National Park. He teaches Mexican history, Texas history, and borderlands history.

Amilcar Shabazz (Ph.D. 1996, Linda Reed) is an expert on race relations and education in the South. His book, Advancing Democracy: African Americans and the Struggle for Access and Equity in Higher Education in Texas, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2004. He is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of Alabama.

Julia Sloan (Ph.D. 2001, John Mason Hart) completed her degree in Mexican history at the University of Houston. Her research investigates on the 1968 student demonstrations in Mexico City. After four years as an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina at Salkehatchie, in Fall of 2004 she started another tenure-track position at Canezius College in Syracuse, NY, as Assistant Professor of History.

Paul Spellman (Ph.D. 1997, Stanley Siegal) is a member of the History Department and Chair of the Division of Communications & Fine Arts at Wharton Junior College in Wharton, Texas, where he specializes in Texas history. His monograph, Forgotten Texas Leader: Hugh McLeod and the Texan Santa Fe Expedition, was published by Texas A & M University Press in 1999.

Sethuraman (Babu) Srinivasan (Ph.D. 2001, Joe Pratt) teaches at Tomball Community College, having moved there in 2003 from Prairie View A & M University. His dissertation investigates the impact of technological change on refinery workers in the U.S. While revising his dissertation for publication, Babu is also working as a contract historian for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on aspects of the environmental history of the Houston Ship Channel.

Mark Steiner (Ph.D. 1993, Robert Palmer) is an American legal historian, having received both a J.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. He has served as an associate editor of the Legal Papers of Abraham Lincoln project, based in Springfield, Illinois. He is now an Assistant Professor of Law at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, where he specializes in legal history, as well as torts and civil procedure.

Daniel Walker (Ph.D. 1999, Susan Kellogg) Daniel E. Walker is an independent scholar and founding director of the Center for Public History and the Arts, a division of the Black Voice Foundation. His book, No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans, was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2004.

Andrew Stephen Walmsley (Ph.D. 1996, James Kirby Martin) teaches U.S. history at the Central Campus of Houston Community College. His scholarly interests focus on early America, and in 1999 New York University Press published his study, Thomas Hutchinson and the Origins of the American Revolution.

Dwight Watson (Ph.D. 1999, Joe Pratt) is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University in San Marcos, where he teaches American history and African American history. An expert on race and law enforcement, Dwight’s book A Change Did Come, tracing the racial integration of the Houston police force, is forthcoming from Texas A & M University Press.