2025-2026 Officers & Board Members

Sonia Hernández, a native of the Rio Grande Valley, received her Ph.D. from the University of Houston. She is the George T. & Gladys H. Abel Professor in Liberal Arts II at Texas A&M University. She is the author of the award-winning Working Women into the Borderlands (2014), For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands (2021), and co-editor of Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border (2021). She is co-founder of RefusingtoForget.org, a non-profit public history project on anti-Mexican violence.

Deborah Liles is the W.K. Gordon Endowed Chair of Texas History at Tarleton State University. Her primary research examines slavery and ranching in antebellum and Civil War communities located between the 97th and 99th meridians. She has written or co-edited five books, including the award-winning Women in Civil War Texas: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi and Texas Women and Ranching: On the Range, at the Rodeo, and in their Communities. She is a Fellow of the East Texas Historical Association and the West Texas Historical Association, and a member of the board of the Friends of The Texas State Library and Archives Commision.

Carlos Kevin Blanton is the Barbara White Stuart Professor of Texas History at the University of Texas at Austin. Carlos taught for 23 years at Texas A&M University, including several as head of its Department of History. He has a Ph.D. from Rice University. He studies the intersection of Chicana/o history and the topics of education, civil rights, immigration, politics, and Texas in George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (Yale 2015), The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (Texas A&M 2004), A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History (Texas 2016), and several journal and magazine articles, including the Western Historical Quarterly, Southern Historical Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, Journal of American Ethnic History, and Texas Monthly.

Dionne Babineaux is a PhD student in history at Rice University. Her academic background includes studies in finance (BBA) and urban planning (MUPEP) while attending Texas Southern University. Her efforts to teach her children about past African American Texans led to her interest in history and the founding of the Museum of Undertold Texas History (MOUTH). Through her work with the MOUTH, She intends to make Black Texas history more visible and accessible. As a history student, she focuses on the Atlantic world and the roles of African and African-descended peoples in its development. Dionne’s work combines digital and public humanities, African American history, Black studies, and Atlantic scholarship into her research projects. While at Rice, she worked as an editorial assistant at the Journal of Southern History and the Slave Voyages Project. She is a 2023 – 2024 Fondren Fellow (Rice University), the 2025 recipient of the Henrietta Wood Memorial Prize, Rice University. In 2026, she will be a Non-Resident Fellow of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Dionne has published a book note in the Journal of Southern History and has contributed to two upcoming projects awaiting publication.

Nancy Elizabeth Baker earned her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University. She is an Associate Professor and Associate Department Chair of History at Sam Houston State University. She is an award-winning teacher and served as the interim Associate Vice Provost of SHSU. For the last eighteen years, Nancy has presented, written, and published on the history of women in Texas and the South. Due out in 2025-2026 from the University of Georgia Press, Nancy’s monograph on the “long conservative women’s movement” traces anti-ERA activism nationally over 100 years. For Louisiana State University Press, Baker is writing a book on twentieth-century feminist legal reformers who changed the Texas state constitution and state law. She has been a member of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Association for Women Historians (lifetime member), the Texas State Historical Association, and the East Texas Historical Association, participating in various capacities and on numerous committees over the years. In 2022-2023, she was the book review editor for the Southwestern Historical Quarterly.

Tim Bowman is a professor of history at West Texas A&M University in Canyon, and serves as head of the Department of History. Tim is a historian of modern Texas. He is the author of Blood Oranges (2016), You Will Never be One of Us (2022), and numerous articles and essays. He is currently working on a book about the farmworker’s movement in Texas during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. He has been a longtime member of the Western History Association, the Agricultural History Society, and the Texas State Historical Association, all of which he has served through membership on various committees. Additionally, he spent three years as founding associate director for WTAMU’s Center for the Study of the American West, helping launch many of the organization’s various initiatives.

Linda English is a Professor of History at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She teaches courses on Texas History, American West, Modern American Women’s History, and Gender in the American West. Her research and publications focus primarily on race, class, and gender during the late nineteenth century, specifically Texas and Indian Territory. She served on organizational committees for both the Western History Association and the Texas State Historical Association. She also served a three-year term as Steering Committee Chair of the Coalition for Western Women’s History and continues to serve this organization as a member of the Professional Development and Mentoring Committee. In 2013, the University of Oklahoma Press published her book, By All Accounts: General Stores and Community Life in Texas and Indian Territory. Her next project examined aspects of the Texas Revolution through the lens of gender. In June 2024, Texas A&M University Press published her second book, Run for Your Lives! Gender and the Runaway Scrape. She has published articles in The Chronicles of Oklahoma, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Great Plains Quarterly, Central Texas Studies and American Nineteenth Century History.

Tiffany Jasmin González is an assistant professor of history at the University of Kansas. She is also affiliated faculty with the Department of Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Program for Museum Studies, and is involved in that university’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Tiffany held the Bill and Rita Clements Research Fellowship at the Clements Center for Southwestern Studies at SMU, and a post-doctoral research post at Tulane University from 2020-21. She has served on boards and committees for the WHA, NCPH, CWWH, OAH, OHA, TSHA, and CCWH. She received a BA and an MA from Texas Tech University and a Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. Tiffany teaches the US. Borderlands since 1848, Introduction to Public History, Chicana/Latina Women’s History, Gender and Power in US Politics, and Latina/o/x Civil Rights.

Todd Moye is the Fenton Wayne Robnett Professor of U.S. History and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of North Texas, where he also directs the UNT Oral History Program. He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin and a B.A. in history from UNC-Chapel Hill. Moye is the author of Ella Baker: Community Organizer of the Civil Rights Movement; Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II; and Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986. With Max Krochmal he co-edited Civil Rights in Black and Brown: Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas, which received the 2022 Oral History Association Book Award, and co-directed the oral history project of the same name (crbb.tcu.edu). He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Bibliography Online for American History and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Southern History and the U.S. Latina and Latino Oral History Journal. A past president of the Oral History Association, he has served on the executive council of The American Council of Learned Societies and as secretary of the International Oral History Association.

Cynthia E. Orozco is Professor Emeritus, Eastern New Mexico University, Ruidoso. She is author of No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (best-selling UT Press academic book 2010-2020); Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist (best book in Texas women’s history from TSHA); Pioneer of Mexican American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales; co-editor of Mexican Americans in Texas History; over 80 articles for the Handbook of Texas; and over 100 op-eds and letters to the editor for newspapers and newsletters in Texas, New Mexico, and California. She is past board member of the Organization of American Historians and a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association. Governor Bill Richardson appointed her to the New Mexico Humanities Council. She was a co-founder of the National Association for Chicano Studies Chicana Caucus and currently serves on the DeWitt County Historical Commission. She is a recipient of two Ford Foundation fellowships, a 2023 NACCS scholar, and received the 2023 National LULAC Raymond Telles Education award.

Fernando Ortiz Jr. is an editor and independent U.S. historian. His primary research focus is Latin America during the U.S. Civil War era. He is also managing editor at Texas Public Radio (TPR), the San Antonio affiliate of National Public Radio. He graduated with a B.A. in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998 and an M.A. in history from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2014. He was a news editor at newspapers in Corpus Christi and San Antonio from 1999 to 2010. From 2015 to 2017, Fernando taught U.S. history at Northwest Vista College, San Antonio College, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Texas A&M University-San Antonio. He then joined TPR in late 2017. Ortiz plans to pursue a doctorate in U.S. history or American Studies. He splits his personal time between San Antonio and Round Rock.

Gregg Cantrell earned his PhD from Texas A&M University and recently held the Erma and Ralph Lowe Chair in Texas History at Texas Christian University. His books include Stephen F. Austin, Empresario of Texas (2000), and The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism (2020). He is a former president of the Texas State Historical Association and a Texas Institute of Letters member.

Gary L Pinkerton, Executive Director of the Alliance for Texas History, is an avocational historian and the author of works of history that include Trammel’s Trace: The First Road to Texas from the North (2016). Paper Diver: How the World’s Greatest Underwater Treasure Hunter Never Got Wet, was published in 2024 and Bridles & Biscuits: Contraband Culture in Spanish East Texas in 2025. He has a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Houston and spent his professional career in human resources. He is an ex-officio member of the board.