Conference Faculty

Linda Barnickel is the author of Milliken’s Bend: A Civil War Battle in History and Memory, which won the A.M. Pate, Jr., and Francis Landry Awards. She has published widely on history and genealogy and is a member of the Society of Civil War Historians.

Neil Chatelain teaches history at Lone Star College. He is the author or editor of many books, including Defending the Arteries of the Rebellion and Treasure and Empire in the Civil War, which won the A.M. Pate, Jr., Award.

Jeffrey William Hunt is the Director of the Texas Military Forces Museum in Austin. Previously, he served as Curator of Collections and Director of the Living Program at the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. Jeff is the author of The Last Battle of the Civil War: Palmetto Ranch, as well as a trilogy on Meade and Lee after Gettysburg, published by Savas-Beatie.

M. Jane Johansson is Professor Emerita of History at Rogers State University in Claremore, Oklahoma. She is the author or editor of many books, including New Fields of Adventure: The Writings of Lyman G. Bennett, Civil War Soldier and Topographical Engineer, 1861-1865, and Albert C. Ellithorpe, The First Indian Home Guards, and the Civil War on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier, which won the Founders Award from the American Civil War Museum.

Kelly Houston Jones is Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in History at Arkansas Tech University. She is the author of A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas, which won the Arkansas Historical Association’s John William Graves Award, and is currently at work on Slavery’s Lynchings: Vigilante Killings of Enslaved People from the Colonial Era to the Civil War.

Brian Matthew Jordan is Professor of History, Chair of the Department of History, and Co-Director of the SHSU Civil War Consortium. His six books include Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History, and A Thousand May Fall: An Immigrant Regiment’s Civil War.

Caleb McDaniel is Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University. The editor of the Journal of Southern History, he is the author of three books, including The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, which won the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians, and Sweet Taste of Liberty, which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in History, the OAH Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award, and was a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Lindsey R. Peterson is the Managing Director of the Society of Civil War Historians as well as a Digital Humanities Librarian and Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of South Dakota. Dr. Peterson co-directs the Civil War & Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi digital history project. Her article, “Homebuilders: Gender and Assimilation in Union Civil War Commemorations in the Trans-Mississippi West,” won the Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award from The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Evan C. Rothera is Assistant Professor of History, Director of Graduate Studies in History at Sam Houston State University, and Co-Director of the SHSU Civil War Consortium. He is the author of Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas, which received the Wabash Literary Prize, the Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Award, and was a finalist for the William Colby Award.

Matthew Stith is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Tyler. He is the author or editor of five books, including Extreme Civil War: Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier, Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War, and, most recently, Camp Ford’s Civil War (Cambridge University Press).

Fay Yarbrough is William Gaines Twyman Professor of History and Senior Associate Dean of Graduate Programs and Faculty at Rice University. Yarbrough is the author of Choctaw Confederates (University of North Carolina Press), which won the A.M. Pate, Jr., Award for Best Book on the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi West. She has published a bevy of book chapters and articles and has served on the editorial board of The Journal of the Civil War Era.