Job Placements and Publications 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. The University of Georgia Press published his book, Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonial Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court, 1837-1857, 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. She recently published Love Canal revisited: Race, Class and Gender in Environmental Activism (2008) with University Press of Kansas.

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.

Bruce Beauboef (Ph.D. 1997, Joe Pratt) is the Editor of Pipeline and Gas Technology, a Hart Energy Publishing magazine that covers the oil and gas pipeline transportation industry. In that role, he reviews and oversees all editorial content, and writes regular features for the magazine as well. He published his book, The Strategic Petroleum Reserve: U.S. Energy, Security and Oil Politics, 1975-2005 (2007) with 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 Seller 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.

James Carter (Ph.D., 2006, Bob Buzzanco) is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. His book, Inventing Vietname: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968 is adapted from his UH dissertation and forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Jay Casey (Ph.D., 2005, Bob Buzzanco) is an assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith. In addition to helping train secondary school social studies teachers in northwest Arkansas, he has developed courses on the Second World War, Nazi Germany and the Cold War. Dr. Casey continues to focus on the work of soldier cartoonists during the wars of the twentieth century. He has presented papers based on his research at the United States Naval Academy and the Library of Congress.

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. A few years ago, he took a leave from the university to serve as the Research Director of the Commission for Labor Cooperation, a commissions established as part of the NAFTA agreement. In 2007, Dr. Caulfield was chosen as the President's Distinguished Scholar at Fort Hays State University, the university's highest honor for faculty.

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 enviromental 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.

Pamela Conn (Ph.D. 2001, Bob Buzzanco) is the Department Chair for Social and Behavioral Sciences at Cypress Creek High School where she teaches Advanced Placement U.S. History, American Studies, and a course on the Vietname War. Her expertise is in America's pacification efforts in the Vietname War, particularly during the LBJ years.

Joseph Douglas (Ph.D. 2001, Martin Melosi) is an Associate Professor of History at Volunteer State Community college, in Gallatin, Tennessee, and occasionally serves as an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. He is the assistant editor (for Social Sciences) for the multi-disciplinary Journal of Caves and Karst Studies. His most recent publication, "Torches in the Dark: Late Mississippian Exploration of Hubble Post Office Cave," appears in Cave Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands: Essays in Honor of Patty Jo Watson, published in 2008 by the University of Tennessee Press.

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.

Christos G. Frentzos (Ph.D. 2004, Robert Buzzanco) is an Assistant Professor of History at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. His doctoral dissertation focused on South Korea's military involvement in the Vietnam War. He specializes in US diplomatic and military history and teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. At the graduate level he teaches two classes on the Cold War as well as a course on Unconventional Warfare and US Special Operations since World War II.

Karen Guenther (Ph.D. 1994, James Kirby Martin) is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Mansfield University in north-central Pennsylvania. Karen has published two books: "Rememb'ring Our Time and Work is the Lords" The Experiences of Quakers on the Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania Frontier (Susquehanna University Press, 2005), a revised version of her dissertation, and Sports in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania Historical Association, 2007). She is currently revising a chapter on the portrayal of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania on film for Pennsylvania's Revolution, to be published by Penn State Press. Karen also is Business Secretary for the Pennsylvania Historical Association and has been included in several editions of Who's Who Among American Teachers.

Barbara Hayward (Ph.D. 2003, Eric Walther) has been teaching full time at Lone Star College - Tomball since 2000. Currently she is Lead Faculty for history within the Social Science Department. Her dissertation explored the education of Texas freedmen immediately following the Civil War. She has presented several papers on the topic and is revising her dissertation for publication.

Sonia Hernandez (Ph.D. 2006, John Hart) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg. She is working on a manuscript that examines the transformation of the Mexican Northeast from a 'frontier' to borderlands region. Her work contemplates the strategies men and women developed to negotiate, contest, or resist the development of widespread free wage labor and coercive labor systems and the increased presence (both physically and economically) of Americans and other foreigners. By actively engaging the ever-expanding nation- and transnational state, they helped shape the region.

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 entitiled 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.

Thomas Hughes (Ph.D. 1994, Joseph Glathaar) is an associate professor of history at the U.S. Air University, Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base. He is the author of Over Lord: General Pete Quesada and the Triumph of Tactical Air Power in World War II (Free Press, 1995)

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 in 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 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.

Katherine Lopez (Ph.D. 2007, Bob Buzzanco) is currently Assistant Curator of Education at Blaffer Gallery, Art Museum of the University of Houston. She continues her research in African-American/sports history and recently published a book based on her dissertation and entitled Cougars of Any Color: the Integration of University of Houston Athletics, 1964-1968 (McFarland & Co., 2008).

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 apperances on the C-Span network. Kent teaches at the Northwest campus of Houston Community College, where he founded and currently directs the Honors Program.

Thomas McKinney (Ph.D. 2007, Martin Melosi) is an associate historian with HRA Gray & Pape in Houston. He recently published an essay, "Super Highway Deluxe: Houston's Gulf Freeway," in Energy Metropolis: an Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast (University of Pittsburgh, 2007).

Ron Milam (Bob Buzzanco, 2004) is an assistant professor of U.S. and Military History at Texas Tech University, and a member of the Vietnam Center Advisory Board. He teaches the Vietnam War and graduate classes in the historiography of war. He is also revising his dissertation, "Not a Gentleman's War: Junior Officers in the Vietnam War," which will be published in late 2007.

Angela Murphy (Ph.D. 2006, Richard Blackett) is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University. She is an expert on transatlantic reform movements and on race and ethnic relations of mid-19th century America. She currently is revising her dissertation, a study of anti-abolitionist sentiment among members of antebellum American-Irish nationalist groups, for publication.

James C. Patterson (Ph.D. 1990, Martin Melosi) teaches history at Houston Community College, where he currently serves as the History Discipline chairperson for the HCC System. His dissertation, The Houston-Galveston Area Council: A Regional History of Intergovernmental Cooperation," was published by HGAC for distribution to its members. Dr. Patterson, a NISOD recipient, specializes in Texas History and has been a pioneer in delivering instruction via the Internet. He holds adjunct teaching positions with the University of Houston and Houston Baptist University.

Ernest Obadele-Starks 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), "Freebooters and Smugglers": Advancing the Foreign Slave Tade in the United States after 1808 (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), and numerous scholarly articles.

Jaime Olivares (Ph.D. 2003, Thomas O'Brien) teaches history at Houston Community College-Central. A Specialist on labor history in Latin America, he is completing a manuscript, Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place": A History of the Oil Workers in Maracaibo, Venezuela, 1925-1958. Dr. Olivares recently co-authored Public Pillars/Private Lives: The Strengths and Limitations of the Modern American Presidents (Abigail Press 2005) and is completing research on a book about Lyndon Johnson's foreign policy in Venezuela.

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.

Betsy Powers (Ph.D. 1996, Cheryl Cody) teaches history at the Montgomery campus of the Lone Star College System (formerly North Harris Montgomery Community College System), where she also directs the Honors Program. She is currently working to create a study abroad program for the Honors Program. Her scholarly interests focus on the history of the South and Texas history.

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 verà 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 Liasons" 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 Full 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 State 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 and recently won the T.R. Fehrenbach Book Award for scholarship that "preserves, records, and recounts the prehistory and history of Texas". He is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Director of the African-American Studies Program at the University of Alabama.

Courtney Q. Shah (Ph.D. 2006, Landon Storrs) is an instructor of history at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington, where she teaches U.S. and world history courses. She is currently revising her dissertation into a book which studies the early twentieth-century sex education movement in the United States.

Hal Shelton (Ph.D. 1991, James Kirby Martin) has been at San Jacinto College since finishing his degree at the University of Houston. He also taught at the American Military University from 1994 to 2003. He is the author of From Redcoat to Rebel: General Richard Montgomery and the American Revolution (New York University Press, 1994).

Julia Sloan (Ph.D. 2001, John Mason Hart) completed her degree in Mexican history at the University of Houston. Her research investigates the 1968 student demonstrations in Mexico City. After four years as an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina at Salkehatchie, Dr. Sloan accepted a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at Cazenovia College in Cazenovia, New York, near Syracuse, in Fall 2004.

Paul Spellman (Ph.D. 1997, Stanley Siegal) is a member of the History Department and Chair of the Division of Commuincations & 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.

Beverly Tomek (Ph.D. 2006, Richard J.M. Blackett) is an instructor of History at the University of Houston-Victoria and also teaches at Wharton County Junior College. She has published articles in American Nineteenth Century History and Pennsylvania History, and was a section editor for the Encyclopedia of American Social Movements (2004). She is currently serving as Associate Editor for Blackwell Publishing's International Encyclopedia of Protest and Revolution, and her book on the African colonization movement is being reviewed by New York University Press.

Roy Vu (Ph.D. 2006, Bob Buzzanco) teaches at North Lake College in Irving, Texas as a visiting scholar and professor of history. He is revising his dissertation, "Rising from the Cold War Ashes: Construction of a Vietnamese-American Community in Houston, 1975-2005." for publication and recently published an essay on the ethnic and national identity crises in Houston's Vietnamese community for Asian-Americans in the South (University of Georgia Press, 2008).

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.

Michael Wilson (Ph.D. 1994, Bailey Stone) is a full-time instructor for Phoenix College (part of the Maricopa Community Colleges) since 1997. He teaches courses in Western Civilization, U.S. History, and African-American History. He served on the Program Committee of the Society for French Historical Studies National Meeting in 2001. He is also a founding member of French Historians in Arizona (FHAZ) organization.

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