NATALIE J. RING
School of Arts & Humanities
University of Texas at Dallas
800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080
nring@utdallas.edu
Education
PhD in History, University of California San Diego (2003)
B.A. Magna cum laude in American Studies and Magna cum laude in Music, Amherst College (1990)
Books and Edited Collections
The Lost Lectures of C. Vann Woodward co-edited with Sarah E. Gardner (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South co-edited with Amy Louise Wood (University of Illinois Press, 2019)
The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South co-edited with Stephanie Cole (Texas A&M Press, 2012)
The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (University of Georgia Press, 2012)
Finalist for Best First Book Prize, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
Finalist for TIL Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters
Books in Progress
The Bloodiest Prison in America: Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (in research stage)
Published Articles and Book Chapters
“Progress and Reaction in the Progressive-Era South,” W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., The New History of the American South (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2022)
“The Paradox of the Business and Political Economy of the New South,” The Routledge History of Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Jonathan Daniel Wells (Routledge, 2018)
“A New Kind of Reconstruction for the South” in Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America's Most Tumultuous Era, edited by Carole Emberton and Bruce Baker (Louisiana State University Press, 2017)
“Massachusetts and Mississippi: William Faulkner and the Problem of the South” in Faulkner in History, edited by Jay Watson (University Press of Mississippi, 2017)
“The Tropics,” in Critical Terms for Southern Studies edited by Jennifer Rae Greeson and Scott Romine (University of Georgia Press, 2016)
“Irony of Ironies: The Discipline of History in the New Southern Studies,” Journal of American Studies 48 (Issue 3, August 2014)
“Sister Peter Claver and the Catholic Evangelical Movement in Alabama,” Alabama Heritage History Magazine (Issue 109, Summer 2013)
“The ‘New Race Question’: The Problem of Poor Whites and the Color Line,” in The Culture of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South, 1880-1920, edited by Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, Texas A&M Press (April 2012).
“Mapping Regional and Imperial Geographies: Tropical Disease in the U. S. South,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of a Modern American State, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, University of Wisconsin Press (March 2009)
“Linking Regional and Global Spaces in Pursuit of Southern Distinctiveness,” special issue entitled Global Contexts, Local Literature: The New Southern Studies, American Literature 78 (December 2006)
“Inventing the Tropical South: Race, Region, and the Colonial Model,” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 56 (fall 2003)
Awards and Recognition
OAH Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians (2015-present)
Finalist, Best First Book, Berkshire Conference on Women Historians (2012)
Finalist, TIL Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book, Texas Institute of Letters (2012)
Distinguished Teaching in Diversity and Multicultural Education, University of Texas at Dallas (2011)
Finalist, C. Vann Woodward Prize for Best Dissertation, Southern Historical Association (2004)
Fellowships and Grants
Special Faculty Development Grant (sabbatical), University of Texas at Dallas, Spring 2020
HEARTS Grant, “The Bloodiest Prison in America: Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola,” University of Texas at Dallas Office of Research (2019-2020)
Charlton Oral History Grant, “Angola: An Oral History of Louisiana State Penitentiary in the 1950s-1970s,” Baylor University Institute for Oral History (2016-2017)
Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History Research Grant for “Painting on the Inside: Outsider Art at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola,” University of Texas at Dallas (2016)
Fellow, National Endowment of the Humanities, Institute for Mid-Career American Historians, “Doing Digital History, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University (2014)
Special Faculty Development Grant, University of Texas at Dallas (2012-2013)
Guion Griffis Johnson Research Grant, UNC Manuscripts Division, Southern Historical Collection (2002)
Dissertation Writing Fellowship, Dept. of History, University of California San Diego (2001-2002)
Copeland Fellow in Residence, Sponsored by David Blight and David Wills, Amherst College (2000)
Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History (1999)
Albert J. Beveridge Research Grant, American Historical Association (1999)
Rockefeller Archive Center Research Grant (1998 and 1999)
Southern History Dissertation Research Fellowship, University of California San Diego (1998-99)
J. Walter Thompson Research Grant, Honorable Mention for copying expenses, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, Duke University (1997)
First Year Fellowship for Study in the History Dept., University of California San Diego (1994-1995)
Forris Jewett Moore Fellowship in History (1996-1998)
Amherst College Memorial Fellowship, for graduate study (1995-96)
Invited Lectures and Keynotes
“The Transnational Turn in Post-Emancipation Studies,” Response to the Keynote Address by Thavolia Glymph, Southern Intellectual History Circle, Mercer University (February 2019)
“‘The Bloodiest Prison in America’: Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, History Department, Louisiana Tech University (February 2019)
“Angola Prison in Louisiana: The History and Meaning of Place,” History Department, University of Central Arkansas (April 2016)
“Mapping Regional and Tropical Pathologies: The Problem South in the National Imagination,” Keynote Address, Fourth Annual Student Research Symposium, University of Central Arkansas (April 2016)
“Southern Studies and the Distinctiveness Problem," Response to Keynote Address by Susan Donaldson, Southern Intellectual History Circle, Edgefield, South Carolina (February 2015)
“Massachusetts and Mississippi: How Faulkner and Contemporary Critics Grappled with the Problem of the South,” Keynote Address, 41st Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, "Faulkner and History," University, of Mississippi (July 2014)
“The Two Headed Hydra of Reform and Violence: The Dallas Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s,” Dallas Holocaust Museum in conjunction with the exhibit “Seeking Justice: the Leo Frank Case Revisited” (December 2013)
“The South as a National and Global Problem,” Summersell Center for the Study of the American South, University of Alabama (October 2013)
“‘The New Race Question:’ The Poor White Problem and the Color Line,” Walter Prescott Webb Lecture Series, University of Texas at Arlington (March 2008)
“Mapping Regional, Racial, and Imperial Geographies: Tropical Disease in the U.S. South,” Transitions & Transformations in the U. S. Imperial State: The Search for New Synthesis A.W. Mellon Interdisciplinary Workshops in the Humanities, U-Wisconsin Madison (November 2006)
“Linking Regional and Global Spaces,” Roundtable on Southern Studies and Other Souths, Symposium on The U. S. South in Global Perspectives, Center for the Study on Southern Culture, University of Mississippi (February 2004)
Selected Conferences
Commentator on panel, “Policing Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, Public Policy, and Power in Urban Texas,” Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting, Fort Worth (March 2021)
Chair of panel, “Rethinking Foucault: Prisoner Resistance/Prisoner Activism and the Contours of the Carceral State,” American Historical Association, Seattle (January 2021, canceled due to COVID)
Commentator on panel, “The Changing Face of Criminal Justice in the Jim Crow South,” Southern Historical Association, Memphis (November 2020, postponed to next year due to COVID)
Roundtable participant, “New Directions in the History of Policing and Punishment in the Jim Crow South,” Organization of American Historians, Philadelphia (April 2019)
Commentator on panel: “Voices from the Abyss: The Angolite Magazine, 1953-2016,” Louisiana Historical Association, New Orleans (April 2018)
“Filling in the Documentary Pieces: Writing a History of Angola Prison,” roundtable on “Prisons and Policing in Louisiana, History, Politics, Representation,” Organization of American Historians, New Orleans (April 2017)
“Problems and Promises: The Rocky Path of the New South," roundtable on "Revisiting Reunion and Reconciliation,” Southern Historical Association," Little Rock (November 2015)
“C. Vann Woodward as Historian," roundtable on "The Legacy of C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South in the Twenty-First Century," (panel organizer) Organization of American Historians, St. Louis (April 2015)
“Is There Any Place for the Discipline of History in the New Southern Studies?” roundtable on “A Southern Peace? History, Literary Studies, and the New Southern Studies,” American Historical Association, New York City (January 2015)
“The Carceral State as a Site of Entertainment: Louisiana State Penitentiary and the Marketing of Race and Reform,” Conference on Rethinking Incarceration in the South, University of Mississippi (April 2014)
Commentator on panel: "Negotiating Race and Region in the Nineteenth Century United States,” American Historical Association, Washington D.C. (January 2014)
“U-Turn or New Turn?: Writing and Teaching About the U.S. South in a Global Context,” Southern Historical Association, Mobile (October 2012)
Commentator on panel: "Reforming Criminal Justice in Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Association, New Orleans (March 2012)
“Rethinking Tom Watson: White Slavery, Politics, and the Catholic Hierarchy,” Dallas Area Society of Historians Colloquium, Southern Methodist University (September 2011)
“The Question of Race and Southern Distinctiveness,” Workshop: Gender and Race in the Global South,Southern Historical Association, Richmond (November 2007)
“The Menace of the Diseased South: Sickness in the Body and the Body Politic,” (panel organizer) American Historical Association, Philadelphia (January 2006)
“The Paradox of the New South: Reassessing the Distinctiveness Question in Southern History,” Dallas Area Society of Historians Colloquium, Southern Methodist University (January 2006)
“‘The Negro Problem’ in America is but a local phase of a world problem’: The Jim Crow South in a Global Context” (panel organizer), Southern Historical Association, Atlanta (November 2005)
“Southern Neo-Orientalism in the National Popular Imagination,” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association, San Diego (March 2005)
“Rehabilitating the Problem South: Northern Travelers and ‘Southern Neo-Orientalism,’” International Society for Travel Writing Conference, Milwaukee (October 2004)
Moderator on panel, “Transnational Tales of Resistance,” Race and Place in the Americas Conference, University of Alabama (March 2004)
“Mapping Regional and Tropical Pathologies: The Problem of the South in the National Imagination,” History Colloquium, Tulane University, New Orleans (April 2003)
“Racializing the Region: The U. S. South, American Empire and the ‘Race Problem,’” Race and Place in the Americas Conference, University of Alabama (March 2003)
“The ‘Southern Problem’: A Project of Internal Colonialism During the Age of Empire” (panel organizer),American Historical Association, Chicago, Illinois (January 2003)
“Inventing the Tropical South: Race, Region, and the Colonial Model,” Symposium on Postcolonial Theory, the U. S. South, and New World Studies, Puerto Vallarta, American Literature Association/Society for the Study of Southern Literature (December 2002)
“Bugs, Worms, and Parasites: The Menace of the Diseased South and Its Threat to National Prosperity” (panel organizer), Southern Historical Association, Louisville, Kentucky (November 2000)
“The Not So New South: Regional Metaphors of Disease and Infection,” History Dept. Colloquium, University of California San Diego (October 2000)
“The Problem of the South: Regionalism in Progressive Era America,” Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, Amherst, MA (April 2000)
“What Makes the ‘Color Line?’: Miscegenation as Part of the Southern ‘Race Problem’ in Early Twentieth-Century America” (panel organizer), Citadel Conference on the South, Charleston, South Carolina (April 2000)
“Cotton Culture in the Postbellum South: Burden or Salvation?” Western Social Science Association, Rural and Agricultural Studies Section, San Diego (April 2000)
“Sister Peter Claver Fahy: Keeping the Catholic Faith Alive in Protestant Georgia,” Georgia Women Meeting Challenges Symposium, Georgia Women of Achievement Inc., Shorter College, Rome, Georgia (March 1999)
“Tom Watson’s Political Pornography: White Slavery and the Catholic Hierarchy,” Southern Historical Association, Little Rock (November 1996)
“Tom Watson’s Affair With Obscenity: Gender, Anti-Catholicism and Republican Political Ideology, 1910-1917,” Mid-America Conference on History, Columbia, Missouri (September 1995)
Book Reviews and Roundtables
Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction by David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski in American Historical Review (April 2020)
Stories of the South: Race and Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915 by K. Stephen Prince in Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (September 2016)
The Ongoing Burden of Southern History: Politics and Identity in the Twenty-First-Century South by Angie Maxwell, Todd Shields, and Jeannie Whayne in Journal of Southern History 81 (February 2015)
Robert Penn Warren's Who Speaks for the Negro? Archival Collection Web Site in Journal of American History 101 (March 2015)
Review essay in forum on Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South with Andy DeRoche, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Paul A. Kramer, Natalie J. Ring in H-Diplo/ISS Roundtable Reviews (March 7, 2013)
Black Star: African American Activism in the International Political Economy by Ramla M. Bandele in Journal of American History 96 (March 2010)
Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Children Learned Race by Jennifer Ritterhouse in Southwest Historical Quarterly 112 (July 2009)
Carnival of Blood: Dueling, Lynching, and Murder in South Carolina, 1880-1920 by John Hammond Moore in Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007)
Race Over Empire: Racism and U. S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 by Eric T. Love in Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians 14 (March 2006)
Black and White in the Southern States: A Study of the Race Problem in the United States From a South African Point of View by Maurice S. Evans, introduction George M. Fredrickson in Southern Historian 10 (Spring 2002)
Multimedia and Interviews
“Ida B. Wells and Rebecca Latimer Felton Discuss the Problem of Lynching,” C-SPAN Lectures in History series (filming on November 3, 2015)
Interview, discussing essay in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, “Against the Grain” hosted by C.S. Soong on Pacifica Radio (KPFA) in Berkeley (July 6, 2009)
“Encountering the Problem South in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Southern Spaces: An Internet Journal and Scholarly Forum (April 16, 2004)
Academic Appointments
Associate Professor of History, University of Texas at Dallas (2012-present)
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas (2016-2018)
Assistant Professor of History, University of Texas at Dallas (2004-2012)
Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Tulane University (2002-2004)
Research and Consulting Positions
Researcher, Historic Profiles of American Incarceration, NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, PI Steven Soper, Heather Ann Thompson and Barry Godfrey (2019-2020)
In Residence Consultant, Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation (spring semester 2016)
Consultant, Programming for visiting Leo Frank Exhibit, Dallas Holocaust Museum (2013)
Consultant, Leadership Richardson’s Oral History Project, Sponsored by the City of Richardson and the Richardson Arts Commission (2004)
Research Assistant for Jonathan S. Holloway: Black Scholars on the Line: Race and Social Science in American Thought 1895-1975, Ethnic Studies Dept., University of California San Diego (1997)
Research Assistant for Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration History Department, University of California San Diego (1996)
Research Assistant for David Wills and Al Raboteau eds., Afro-American Religious History Documentary Project, Supported by the Lilly Foundation and Pew Foundation (1993-95)
Manuscript Reviewing
Harvard University Press
University of North Carolina Press
Louisiana State University Press
University of Georgia Press
Routledge Press
Pearson Longman Press
Wiley-Blackwell Press (Discovering the Past: Documentary Readers in American History)
Bedford/St. Martin’s Press (Bedford Series in History and Culture)
Journal of Southern History
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Modern American History
Southern Cultures
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History
Professional Membership
Southern Historical Association
Organization of American Historians
Louisiana Historical Association
African American Intellectual History Society
Southern Association for Women Historians
Society for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era