Dr. Natalie J. Ring is a cultural, intellectual, and social historian who focuses on the post-Civil War South. She teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas and is the author/editor of several books. The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (2012) was a finalist for two awards: the Best First Book Award from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the TIL Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book from the Texas Institute of Letters. It traces the evolution of the idea of the “southern problem” in the context of U.S. colonialism and explains how national reform efforts to modernize the South contributed to the development of early twentieth-century liberalism. In addition, she is the co-editor of The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South (2012); Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South (2019); and The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward (2020).
Ring’s scholarship has appeared in a number of journals and edited volumes and she has been invited to present her work to audiences across the United States in both public and academic forums. Her contributions to the historical profession, among many, include appointment as a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians in 2015 and serving as a juror (2019) and juror/chair (2020) for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Currently she is working on two projects. The first is a sweeping history of Louisiana State Penitentiary (known as Angola Prison) which has the world’s highest incarceration rate per capita. The second is a legal/social history of the disproportionate number of black men sentenced to death row for the crime of rape in the South and efforts in the 1960s by civil rights activists to challenge racial discrimination in such cases via examination of the jury system.
Dr. Ring received two Bachelor’s degrees in American Studies and Music (magna cum laude in both) from Amherst College and an MA and PhD in History from the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Dallas, Texas and tweets at @HistoryCounts.
