Monica Muñoz Martinez is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University and an Andrew Carnegie fellow. She an award-winning author, educator, and public historian. Her research specializes in histories of violence, policing on the US-Mexico border, Latinx history, women and gender studies, and public humanities. Her first book The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard University Press, Sept 2018) is a moving account of a little-known period of state-sponsored racial terror inflicted on ethnic Mexicans in the Texas–Mexico borderlands. She is currently at work on Mapping Violence a digital research project that recovers histories of racial violence in Texas between 1900 and 1930. Martinez is also a founding member of the non-profit organization Refusing to Forget that calls for public commemorations of anti-Mexican violence in Texas. Born and raised in south Texas, Martinez received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.
Benjamin H. Johnson teaches at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author or editor of seven books, including a study of the border racial violence of the 1910s, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans.” He is a founding member of Refusing to Forget.
Walter L. Buenger was born in Ft. Stockton, Texas, and he grew up there. Both sides of his family told stories that stretched back to the Civil War, but his father’s German Texan relatives had a decidedly more jaundiced view of that conflict than his mother’s Anglo kin. Those stories with their conflicting views of the past and his early years in the Trans-Pecos country gave him a lifelong interest in the nuanced history and varied cultures of the South and Southwest. He left the Trans-Pecos for Houston and graduated from Rice University with a BA in 1973. After earning a PhD from Rice he began teaching in the Department of History at Texas A&M University in 1979, and he remained at A&M until 2017 when he joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. Buenger has written or co-written four books, edited three more, and authored numerous articles and book chapters. His main areas of interest have been the connections between Texas and the South, Texas identity, historiography, the role of memory, the influence of borders, and the construction and evolution of culture in the Southwest.
Trinidad Gonzales is an Instructor at South Texas College in McAllen, Texas. His area of research includes the Rio Grande Valley during the 19th and 20th centuries. Professor Gonzales is a founding member of Refusing to Forget and served as councilor of the American History Association.
Kirby Warnock is a 1974 graduate of Baylor University with a BA in History. He lives in Fort Stockton, TX, where he serves as a member of the Pecos County Historical Commission and is the producer of the PBS documentaries, Return to Giant, Border Bandits, and When Dallas Rocked. For a preview of his documentary, “Border Bandits,” click on the following link: https://youtu.be/KAQhD4Iazjw
Dr. Cynthia E. Orozco, of Cuero, Texas and the daughter of Mexican immigrants, is Professor of History and Humanities at Eastern New Mexico University in Ruidoso. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and UCLA, she taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement and co-editor of Mexican Americans in Texas History. Two books are forthcoming: “Agent of Change: Adela Sloss Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Feminist in Texas” (University of Texas Press) and “Alonso S. Perales, Architect of Latino Destiny” (Arte Publico Press). She has written over 100 encyclopedia articles including for the New Handbook of Texas, and over 100 newspaper articles. Orozco is a founder of the Chicana Caucus of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, a Texas State Historical Association fellow, and has appeared on C-SPAN.
Richard Ribb earned his PhD in American studies in 2001 from The University of Texas at Austin. He taught at UT-Austin, Texas A&M, and Austin Community College. He was featured in the critically acclaimed documentary Border Bandits (Trans-Pecos, 2004), for which he participated in several screenings and Q&As. His most recent publication, the essay “La Rinchada: Revolution, Revenge, and the Rangers, 1910-1920,” appears in War Along the Border: The Mexican Revolution and Tejano Communities (ed. Arnoldo De León, Texas A&M Press, 2012). He is in private practice in Austin as an educational consultant to young adults in transition.
Beth Lew-Williams is an assistant professor of history and Philip and Beulah Rollins Bicentennial Preceptor at Princeton University. She is a historian of race and migration in the United States, specializing in Asian American history. Her new book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion and the Making of the Alien in America, maps the tangled relationships between local racial violence, federal immigration policy, and U.S. imperial ambitions in Asia. Lew-Williams earned her A.B. from Brown University and Ph.D. in history from Stanford University. She has held fellowships from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Gabriela González is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio where she teaches courses on the US-Mexico borderlands, Latina/o history, and women’s history. She is the author of Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights to be published by Oxford University Press in July 2018. She has written articles on transborder activists, among these “Carolina Munguía and Emma Tenayuca: The Politics of Benevolence and Radical Reform, 1930s,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, A Special Issue on Gender on the Borderlands, vol. 24, no. 2-3, edited by Antonia Castañeda and Sue Armitage, Spring 2004. Reprinted by the University of Nebraska in 2007 and “Jovita Idar: The Ideological Origins of a Transnational Advocate for La Raza,” in Texas Women/American Women: Their Lives and Times, edited by Stephanie Cole, Rebecca Sharpless, and Elizabeth Hayes Turner (University of Georgia Press), 2015. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford University in 2005.
Philis M. Barragán Goetz is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, where she teaches classes on Mexican American history, women’s studies, and U.S. social and cultural history. Her manuscript Reading, Writing, and Revolution is under contract with University of Texas Press.
Carlos K. Blanton is currently a Professor of History. He joined the Aggie community in 2001 from teaching at Portland State University and a PhD at Rice University. His authored books are The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (TAMU, 2004) and George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale, 2014) and he has recently edited A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History (Texas, 2016). Blanton’s work has been honored with the Coral Horton Tullis Award for best book in Texas history (2005), the Bolton Cutter Award for best article in Borderlands history (2010) and the National Association of Chicana-Chicano Studies best book award (2016). He has also published in the Journal of Southern History, the Pacific Historical Review, the Western Historical Quarterly, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, the Teachers College Record, and in other history and interdisciplinary journals. In the spring of 2017 Blanton will serve as a Glasscock Center for Humanities Research Faculty Fellow as he works on his next book project, Between Black and White: The Chicana/o in the American Mind. He enjoys teaching 20th Century U.S, Texas, and Chicana/o history.
Jonathan Xavier Inda earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and an A.B. in Public Policy from Stanford University. His research areas include immigration politics and policy; criminalization and punishment; race, science, and medicine; culture and globalization; and Latina/o populations in the United States. Dr. Inda is author of the books Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics (2006) and Racial Prescriptions: Pharmaceuticals, Difference, and the Politics of Life (2014), as well as editor or co-editor of the volumes Race, Identity, and Citizenship (1999), Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics (2005), The Anthropology of Globalization (2008), and Governing Immigration Through Crime (2013). He is currently working on a project that looks at the critical issue of state violence against two key racialized groups—Indigenous peoples and migrants/refugees—in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States. The project is collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature, involving a team of five scholars in four countries (Australia, the US, Canada, and the UK) who work across the fields of cultural studies, critical legal studies, sociology, anthropology, and media studies. The project specifically focuses on the deaths of Indigenous peoples and migrants in sites of state custody and responsibility, for example, police cells, prisons, immigration detention centers, and borders. We examine how these deaths occur, as well as elucidate how legal and social accountability for them is understood and assigned or disowned.
Katherine Hite is Professor of Political Science on the Frederick Ferris Thompson Chair at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is the author of Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (Routledge 2012) and co-editor with Mark Ungar of Sustaining Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century: Strategies from Latin America (Johns Hopkins 2013), as well as several publications on the politics of memory, memorials and memorial museums.
Gema Santamaría (PhD, New School for Social Research) is assistant professor of Latin American History at Loyola University, Chicago (LUC). Her research focuses on state building, violence, and justice in Mexico and Latin America at large. She is the editor, together with David Carey Jr., of the volume Violence and Crime in Latin America: Representations and Politics (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). Prior to joining LUC, Santamaría was an assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies at the Department of International Relations of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She has been a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at University of California San Diego, and at the University of Texas at Austin, under a Matías Romero Fellowship.
Kidada E. Williams is a nationally recognized expert on African Americans’ lived experiences of racist violence. Her first book, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War One, was published by the New York University Press in 2012. She is the co-editor, with Chad Williams and Keisha Blain, of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence, which the University of Georgia Press published in 2016. She is completing a book about African American families attacked by the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War. Williams earned her PhD in History from the University of Michigan. She is an Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University, the urban research university in Detroit, where she teaches courses on African American and American history.Her clear-eyed understanding of the history and politics surrounding the study and teaching of African American history informs Williams’s commitment to sharing her knowledge with broad audiences. She gives lectures and talks at public institutions and shares historical information on social media. She is one of the co-developers of #CharlestonSyllabus, a crowd-sourced project that helped people understand the historical context surrounding the 2015 racial massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church. She has appeared on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “On Point,” “BackStory with the American History Guys,” “Slate Academy: Reconstruction,” and local radio stations. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, DAME, Slate, Bridge Magazine, The Journal of American History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, and American Nineteenth Century History. Lately, Williams has been extending her commitment to public work by sharing her expertise on survivors of anti-black violence on podcasts and with documentary filmmakers. Someday, she hopes to produce her own short historical films on African American history. When she is not working, she is taking advantage of the many perks of living and playing in Detroit.
Christopher Carmona is an Assistant Professor of Mexican American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is a member of the Ad Hoc Committee for the TX State Board of Education for Mexican American Studies. Currently, he serves as the Chair of the NACCS Tejas Foco Committee on Implementing MAS in PreK-12 Education in Texas. His short story collection, The Road to Llorona Park, is listed by NBCNews as one of the 8 Great Latino Books published in 2016. Carmona was the winner of the NACCS Tejas Award for Best Fiction Book of 2016 for The Road to Llorona Park. He serves on Responsible Ethnic Studies Textbook committee that was awarded the “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” award for excellence in educational leadership f from the Mexican American School Board Association (MASBA). He has published three books of poetry, co-edited two anthologies, and co-authored a scholarly conversation book, called Nuev@s Voces Poeticas: A Conversation about new Chican@ Identities. Currently, he is working on a series of YA novellas reimagining the “Lone Ranger” story as a Chicanx superhero fighting Texas Rangers in the Rio Grande Valley from 1905-1920 entitled El Rinche: The Ghost Ranger of the Rio Grande. Book One is out in bookstores now.
Andrew R. Graybill is professor and chair in the department of history at Southern Methodist University, where he also co-directs the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2003, he taught for eight years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of two books, the most recent of which – The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West – was published by Liveright/W.W. Norton & Company in 2013. He has also co-edited two essay collections: Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories (Duke University Press, 2010), with Ben Johnson; and Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (University of California Press, 2015), with Adam Arenson. He is currently working on a book about the Great Plains.
James Sandos is the University of Redlands Farquhar Professor of the American Southwest. He received the PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 1978 and is the author of Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904-1923 (University of Oklahoma 1992). He is currently at work on a book-length study of choirs and choristers in the California Missions. He has published over twenty articles and a book on the topic of California Missions and his work on the Plan de San Diego continues to be widely cited.
William D. Carrigan is Chair and Professor of History at Rowan University. A native Texan, he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. In 1999, he earned his PhD in American history from Emory University and joined the faculty in the Department of History at Rowan. He is the author or editor of numerous scholarly articles and four books, including The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916 (University of Illinois Press, 2004), winner of the Richard Wentworth Prize. Since 1995, he has been collaborating with Clive Webb and studying the lynching of Mexicans in the United States. With the support of grants and fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Huntington, the National Science Foundation, and the Clements Center, they have published eight articles or chapters on the subject as well as Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928 (Oxford University Press, 2013). Professor Carrigan’s research has been cited widely in the news media, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, and the Houston Chronicle. In February 2015, Professors Carrigan and Webb published a widely read article in the New York Times on their research. They are currently working on a book-length study of failed or prevented lynchings in the United States.
At Rowan, Professor Carrigan has taught over 100 courses and thousands of students on such topics as the Civil War and Reconstruction, the American West, and the History of New Jersey. In 2013, he won a University-wide competition vote hosted by the Student Government Association at Rowan University and subsequently delivered his hypothetical “last lecture.” In 2014, the Organization of American Historians named him a Distinguished Lecturer in American History.