Assistant Professor 
Education:
PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2017
MA, Texas Tech University, 2010
BA, Texas Tech University, 2006
Biography:
Maggie Elmore is an assistant professor of US Latina/o history at Sam Houston State University. A historian of the 20th century United States, she specializes in immigration, religion and politics, and human rights. For the 2021-2022 year, Dr. Elmore will be on leave at Southern Methodist University as the 2021-2022 Clements Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America. During this time, Dr. Elmore plans to complete her book manuscript, In the Name of the Father: Catholic Bureaucrats, Latino Immigrants, and Human Rights in America. At its core, her project examines the evolution of religious-based rights advocacy and the intractable ties between the US federal government and religious institutions. The book begins with the question, how did the Catholic Church become a key player in US immigration policy? Moving from the backrooms of Washington, DC to the US-Mexico borderlands, In the Name of the Father takes as its primary focus Catholic-affiliated agencies and organizations that collectively comprised a Catholic bureaucracy. Over the course of the twentieth century, these Catholic-affiliated agencies and organizations helped craft and implement US immigration policy. Dr. Elmore is also the co-editor of Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945, forthcoming with NYU Press.
Prior to joining the faculty at SHSU, Dr. held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017. Her research has been generously supported by numerous organizations, including the American Historical Association, the Bancroft Library, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.
Dr. Elmore is actively involved in curriculum planning at SHSU and teaching development. She has served as the History Department’s curriculum coordinator. She has also completed the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) micro credentialing, and SHSU’s writing across the disciplines program. She maintains an active research agenda in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). In 2019, Dr. Elmore received an Odyssey Travel Grant for teaching development.
In addition to the courses listed here, Dr. Elmore also has several courses in development at the graduate and undergraduate levels, including courses on US Latina/o history, global borderlands, and global human rights.
Selected Courses:
Undergraduate:
HIST 1302 US History Since 1877
HIST 3340 Mexican American History Since 1848
Graduate:
HIST 5301 Methods in History
HIST 5376 Contemporary America
HIST 5377 The American West
Selected Publications:
In the Name of the Father: Catholic Bureaucrats, Latino Immigrants, and Human Rights in America (book manuscript in revision).
Faith and Power: Latina/o Religious Politics Since 1945, (book manuscript), co-edited (forthcoming with New York University Press, February 2022), https://nyupress.org/9781479804528/faith-and-power/.
“Catholics, the State, and Latino Advocacy in World War II” in Faith and Power: Latina/o Religious Politics Since 1945, ed. Maggie Elmore, Sergio González, and Felipe Hinojosa, NYU Press (forthcoming).
“Fighting for Hemispheric Solidarity: The National Catholic Welfare Conference and the Quest to Secure Mexican American Employment Rights During World War II,” The US Catholic Historian, volume 35, number 2, (May 2017).
“In the Shadow of the Law: Hanigan and the Genesis of the Immigrant Rights Movement,” The Journal of American History, (in revision for resubmission).
“Immigrant Rights are Civil Rights: Mexican Immigrants and the Post-Brown Supreme Court,” Journal of American Ethnic History, (in preparation).