2026-2027 Officers & Board Members

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.

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.

Betty Hlavaty Patterson is a licensed Certified Public Accountant in Texas.  She earned a B.B.A. in Accounting from the University of Texas at Austin and has practiced in public and private accounting.

For twenty years, she served in various positions with the Texas Department of Insurance, culminating in eight years as Deputy Commissioner for Financial Regulation, where she oversaw all aspects of solvency regulation of over 2,200 insurance companies licensed in Texas.  During her tenure, she led or participated in numerous national and international committees and activities.  She is a recipient of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ Robert Dineen Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to state-level insurance regulation. 

Since 2007, she has consulted with insurance clients on financial and regulatory matters.  She also serves on the boards of two non-profit organizations headquartered in Arkansas and in Texas.  For the past year, she has served on the inaugural Finance Committee of the Alliance for Texas History.

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.

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.

Katherine Kuehler Walters is a historian and independent scholar who has worked as a researcher and archival consultant for public history and preservation projects, exhibits, and publications. She specializes in the history of grassroots civil rights activism, the Ku Klux Klan, and structural racism between the 1870s and 1930s. After completing her PhD in 2018, she worked for the Texas State Historical Association as an editor on the Handbook of Texas and project editor of the Handbook of Texas Women until 2023. She has also taught as an adjunct instructor at local universities. Her publications include essays in Impeached: The Removal of Texas Governor James Ferguson, Rassimus in den USA, [trans. Racism in the USA], and the forthcoming book Centuries of Voices: Portraits of Black Women in Texas History. Throughout her professional career, she has enjoyed working collaboratively and respectfully with people of different backgrounds and viewpoints and can participate as a board member informed by her experiences in public history, the classroom as an adjunct, and nonprofit organizations.

Meredith May is the Department Chair of History, Government, and Geography at Kilgore College and serves as an adjunct instructor at Texas Christian University and Tarrant County College. She earned her PhD from Texas Christian University, where her research focused on twentieth-century East Texas history, with particular attention to gender, race, and entrepreneurship.

She has served as chair of the Committee for Community Colleges within the Organization of American Historians, on the editorial board of the East Texas Historical Journal, and on the board of the East Texas Historical Association. She has also contributed to the Southern Association for Women Historians and the Alliance for Texas History through her work on membership committees. A resident of Longview, Texas, she is a past president of the Junior League of Longview and has held board and leadership roles with the East Texas Alzheimer’s Alliance, the Gregg County Historical Museum, Preservation Longview, and the Gregg County Historical Commission. She also serves on the steering committee for the Longview 1919 Remembrance Project, which has secured a state historical marker and is producing a documentary on the 1919 Longview Race Riot.

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. The League of Latin American Citizens has named Dr. Orozco, as its National Historian.

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. Ortiz 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. 

From 2015 to 2017, Ortiz 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 was a news editor and managing editor at Texas Public Radio (TPR), the San Antonio affiliate of National Public Radio, from 2017 to 2025.

Ortiz plans to pursue a doctorate in U.S. history or American Studies. He splits his personal time between San Antonio and Round Rock.

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.

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.