Board of Directors (interim)

  • Gregg Cantrell, President

    Gregg Cantrell earned his PhD from Texas A&M University and currently holds the Erma and Ralph Lowe Chair in Texas History at Texas Christi.n 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, Managing Director

    Gary L Pinkerton 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). Books coming in 2024 include “Paper Diver: How the World’s Greatest Underwater Treasure Hunter Never Got Wet,” and “Bridles & Biscuits: The Contraband Culture of Spanish East Texas. He has a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Houston and spent his professional career in human resources.

  • Carlos Blanton

    Carlos Kevin Blanton is Professor of History at Texas A&M University in College Station. He has a Ph.D. from Rice University. Carlos has published The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (2004), George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (2014) and edited A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History (2016). His scholarship has garnered awards from NACCS, WHA, and the TSHA.

  • Bobby Cervantes

    Bobby Cervantes is a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. A historian of poverty and inequality in modern America, he earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Kansas and bachelor’s degrees in journalism and government from the University of Texas at Austin. His journalistic work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle and Texas Monthly, and his academic research has been published in The American Historical Review and Early American Studies. He was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley.

  • Light Cummins

    Light T. Cummins, Ph.D., is the Guy M. Bryan Chair of American History, Emeritus, at Austin College, where he served as a Professor of History from 1978 until 2018. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Philosophical Society of Texas. The Governor of Texas appointed him as the official State Historian of Texas, a nonpartisan post in which he served from May 2009 until July 2012. He is the author or editor of fourteen books dealing with Texas history.

  • Frank de la Teja

    Jesús F. “Frank” de la Teja, Ph.D. is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of History at Texas State University. Frank was the inaugural State Historian of Texas (2007-2009) and is a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Association and the Texas Catholic Historical Society, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Philosophical Society of Texas. He formerly served the TSHA as book review editor, president, and executive director. A native of Cuba, he attended Seton Hall University for his BA and MA degrees, and the University of Texas at Austin for his Ph.D. in Latin American history.

  • Sonia Hernández

    Sonia Hernández, a native of the Rio Grande Valley, received her Ph.D. from the University of Houston. She is a Chancellor EDGES Professor of History 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 Refusing to Forget.org, a non-profit public history project on anti-Mexican violence.

  • Brandice Nelson

    Brandice Nelson is a public historian and museum professional specializing in 19th century Texas. Brandice has maintained a 15+ year affiliation with National History Day, and champions student engagement with honest history. Brandice received her BA in history and MA in museum studies from Baylor University, and will receive her executive master's in public leadership from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin in August 2024.

  • Rebecca Sharpless

    Rebecca Sharpless is an eighth-generation Texan and a professor of history at Texas Christian University. She teaches and writes about Texas and the South, particularly women, work, and food. Her current book project is “People of the Wheat: Commodity and Culture in North Texas.” From 1993 to 2006, Sharpless directed the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. She is a Foodways Texas board member and past president of the Oral History Association and the Southern Association for Women Historians. She earned her BA and MA from Baylor and her PhD from Emory University.