CSSW News and Events

2025 CSSW Undergraduate Research Conference

This multidisciplinary undergraduate research conference will highlight and award original works relating to Texas, the Southwestern United States, and Northern Mexico.  We are interested in research that examines the region’s peoples, institutions, histories, cultures, and ecologies. Students are encouraged to submit research or creative works from past or current classes.

The conference will be held from 10:00 am - 1:00 pm on Friday, March 21, 2025. 

Visit the Conference Portal for registration and more information.

Chicana Activism and Reproductive Care:  
Past, Present, and Future  
Dr. Lina-Maria Murillo | University of Iowa  
Tuesday, February 25, 2025 | 12:30 pm | TMH 101 & Online via Zoom

Based on the Lina-Maria Murillo’s book, Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands, this lecture will center on Chicana and Mexican-origin women activists as they fought to provide care to their communities in El Paso, Texas, throughout the twentieth century. Even as they confronted population control advocates and increased reproductive health scrutiny, they came together to help their families live and thrive opening clinics and organizing residents to demand health care on their own terms. 

The Food Voice of Black Freedom: 
A View from Food Power Politics 
Dr. Bobby J. Smith II | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
Thursday, February 27, 2025 | 12:30 pm | TMH 101 & Online via Zoom

Food Power Politics reconfigures how we understand the American Civil Rights Movement,  uses the movement in Mississippi as a litmus test to measure how Black people interface with the nation’s food system, and identifies blind spots that illuminate the persistence of food inequities.

This talk is organized by African American Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Southwest.

When Latinas Fought Fascism:  
Remembering and Recovering Activism through Writing and Public History  
Dr. Sarah McNamara | Texas A&M University  
Tuesday, March 4, 2025 | 12:30 pm | TMH 101

Feminist oral history and archival methods have helped transform our understanding of 20th century American history. Historian Sarah McNamara has focused on a key urban hub in the New South, tracing out the ways Latinas have carved a not-so delicate path in challenging and, some times, confirming politically exclusionary projects in the Jim Crow South. From Luisa Moreno coordinating a cigar roller’s strike to women defending Republican Spain during the Civil war, Dr. McNamara helps us understand the inspiring and troubling dimensions of women’s labor history in a trying time in U.S. history.

Texas: An American History  
Dr. Benjamin Johnson | Loyola University Chicago  
Thursday, April 10, 2025 | 12:30 pm | TMH 101 and Online via Zoom

When Americans turn on their laptops, play video games, go to church, vote, eat TexMex, buy groceries, listen to music, grill steaks, or watch football, they are paying tribute to Texas. Johnson’s lecture shines new light on why Texas has had such a powerful influence on U.S. history.

Texas historian Ben Johnson decided to put together a history of Texas that emphasized connections to the world, not differences. This is that book.

Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare  
Drs. Joshua Paddison, Jennifer Graber, and Joseph Laycock   
Friday, May 2, 2025 | 12:30 pm | Brazos Hall & Online via Zoom

The project takes a close-up look at the Fountaingrove scandal to examine religion, gender, sexuality, and race in the Gilded Age from a fresh perspective. By chronicling the life stories of the people swept up in the scandal, Unholy Sensations reveals connections and tensions between a wide variety of nineteenth-century religious and social groups, including suffragists and spiritualists, Christian Scientists and Theosophists, journalists and politicians, and Protestant ministers and urban reformers. Together, these disparate groups helped spark California's first cult scare, demonizing Harris as the first-but far from the last-dangerous California cult leader. By showing that the term “cult” has always been a marker of race, sexuality, and religion, Unholy Sensations reveals the limits of American freedom and the centrality of religion to the policing of whiteness, family, and nation.