Faculty and Staff
History
Dr. Deborah L. Blackwell is an Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. A member of the TAMIU faculty since 1999, she teaches Historiography, Historical Methods, and a wide variety of U.S. history courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including U.S. women’s history, U.S. southern history, and 19th and 20th century U.S. history. From 2009 through 2020, she served as the Director of the University Honors Program. Dr. Blackwell received her B.A. in History and Government from the College of William and Mary in Virginia; her M.A. in History from North Carolina State University; and her Ph.D. in History from the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include women and gender in Progressive-era reform efforts, gender and race in central and southern Appalachia, and popular culture. She has published in a number of peer-reviewed journals, anthologies, and encyclopedias, including The American Superhero: Encyclopedia of Caped Crusaders in History, ed. Richard Hall (Greenwood Press, 2019); Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism, eds. Connie Park Rice and Marie Tedesco (Ohio University Press, 2015); and Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review 37 (Spring/Summer 2010). Her current projects include a book-length manuscript examining the lives and work of several women leaders of Progressive-era benevolence efforts in central Appalachia in terms of the gender, race, and class dimensions of their work.
Andrew Hazelton is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M International University. He earned his Ph.D. in US working-class history from Georgetown University. His research focuses on labor, race, and migration with a particular emphasis on North American farm labor markets, Mexican workers, and the state. His book project on the Bracero Program examines farm labor migration, agri-businesses, the labor movement, and guest worker policies in the United States and Mexico between the 1930s and the 1960s. He teaches courses in US history.
Jerry Thompson is Regents and Piper Professor of History and author of twenty-seven books by six university presses on the history of the US Civil War and the Southwestern borderlands. His most recent book, from the University of Oklahoma Press, Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls, was published in 2019. Dr. Thompson’s 530-page co-authored biography of General John Ellis Wool is due out by the same press in 2020. Earlier this year, Thompson had an article on the Civil War in Texas published in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. His 950-page History of the New Mexico Volunteers and Militia in the Civil War, which took him ten years to research and write, was published in 2015 and has since received excellent reviews. Tejano Tiger, his biography of José de los Santos Benavides, a legendary figure on the Rio Grande frontier, was published by the Texas Christian University Press in 2018 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Dr. Donovan Weight is an Associate Professional of History in the Humanities Department at Texas A&M International University. He received his PhD in History from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale in December of 2010. His dissertation explored the meaning of slavery and the role that their Central African heritage played in the lives of the enslaved people in the French Illinois Country during the eighteenth century. Dr. Weight is a specialist in Early American, African American, and African Diasporic History. He has taught upper division courses in America covering every era from colonization to the Gilded Age. He has also taught surveys in Early, Modern, and African America, as well as the History of the Atlantic World. His work has been published in various publications including the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society and The History Teacher. Dr. Weight’s current research delves into Early American Religious history with a specific focus on Thomas Bullock, an early Mormon Pioneer.
Interim Dean for College of Arts & Sciences
Associate Professor
AIC 373-A
956.326.2633
sduffy@tamiu.edu
English
Kaitlyn Culliton, Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M International University, holds a Ph.D. from Trinity College in Dublin. She is a specialist in early modern English literature, with particular interests in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, poetry, early modern folklore, and cultural geography. Her teaching interests include British Literature from across the Medieval and early Modern periods. Her current research project, titled, “Fairies in Modern English Drama: Fictionality and Theatrical Landscapes, 1575-1615,” focuses on changes to fairy characters in English dramatic texts across the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries.
Dr. Robert Haynes has taught at Texas A&M International University since January 1992. His courses have included medieval topics, including Chaucer and medieval drama, as well as a variety of courses focused on the Renaissance, particularly Shakespeare. His book The Major Plays of Horton Foote was published in 2010, and his edited volume Critical Insights: Horton Foote appeared in 2016. He continues to publish articles on Foote and on Renaissance England. In 2016, he received the South Central Modern Language Association’s SCMLA Poetry Prize ($500). Writing as R. W. Haynes, he published two poetry collections (Laredo Light and Let the Whales Escape) in 2019.
Adam Kozaczka earned his PhD in English in 2019 from Syracuse University, where he studied the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British novel. His dissertation, currently being transformed into a book manuscript, examines the overlaps between two distinction notions of ‘character’: character in the novel and character evidence in the courtroom. Work related to this dissertation and to other projects have appeared in the European Romantic Review, in the Burney Journal, in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, in a reference book, and in two edited critical collections. He teaches and researches in fields related to the overlaps between literature and law, and is interested in gender, the historical novel, popular culture, genre fiction, and representations of crime and violence in literary texts. He has taught courses in British literature, composition, women’s & gender studies, and debate.
Associate Professor
Academic Innovation Center 378
956.326.2466
debbie.lelekis@tamiu.edu
Debbie Lelekis is an Interim Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences and an Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M International University. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Missouri and her research centers on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American literature. In addition to several articles, she has published the book American Literature, Lynching, and the Spectator in the Crowd: Spectacular Violence (2015). She also co-edited The Working Class in American Literature: Essays on Blue Collar Identity (2021) with Dr. John Lavelle and has two essays in Lynching in American Literature and Journalism (2022). She is currently working on a book-length project on Irvin S. Cobb.
Associate Professor
AIC 336
956.326.2645
pniemeyer@tamiu.edu
http://www.thomashardyfilms.com/
Paul J. Niemeyer is an Associate Professor of English and has been employed at TAMIU since 2007. He received his PhD in English from the University of Arizona. Among his publications are the monograph Seeing Hardy: Film and Television Adaptations of Thomas Hardy’s Fiction (McFarland, 2003), the first single-authored study of Hardy on the screen; and “The Royal Red-Headed Variant: The Prisoner of Zenda and the Heredity Debates of 1893” (College Literature 42. 1 [2015]). His most recent work, “‘What We See Him’: Boldwood and the Role of Man in Two Film Adaptations of Far from the Madding Crowd,” appeared in The Thomas Hardy Journal 35 (2019). Among his teaching interests are Victorian literature, and such genres as Adventure, Espionage, and Horror.
Nathaniel R. Racine holds a PhD in English from Temple University in Philadelphia and a professionally-accredited Master’s degree in Urban Planning from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Before arriving to TAMIU, he taught at various institutions in the Philadelphia area and was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar to Mexico in 2018-2019. His interdisciplinary approach to the humanities draws from the fields of geography and urbanism, and to reading literature and culture across regional and hemispheric contexts. His most recent work focuses on the cultural exchange between the U.S. and Mexico during the interwar period and through midcentury.
Spanish
Irma Cantú is Associate Professor of Mexican and Colonial literature at Texas A&M International University. She has published numerous articles and essays on travel writing and Orientalism in journals in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. She has contributed to several volumes of literary and cultural criticism, such as Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica, edited by José Ramón Ruisánchez and Oswaldo Zavala (Candaya, 2011), Colonial Itineraries of Contemporary Mexico, edited by Oswaldo Estrada and Anna M. Nogar (University of Arizona Press, 2014), and Los oficios del nómada. Fabio Morábito ante la crítica, edited by Sarah Pollack and Tamara Williams (UNAM, 2016).
José Cardona-López is a TAMU Regents Professor. He teaches Spanish Language, Spanish American Literature, and Creative Writing at the Department of Humanities. He was a faculty of the Spanish School at Middlebury College (2003-2011). He holds an MA from the University of Louisville, and a PhD from the University of Kentucky. His major fields of expertise are 20th Century and Contemporary Spanish American Literature, and Creative Writing. His research is focused on the Spanish American narrative (with an emphasis on the short novel or nouvelle) and poetry. In conjunction with scholars from Sorbonne Université (Paris) and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico City), from 2016 to 2019, he co-organized the annual Interuniversity Seminar “Plural Writings: Theory and Praxis of the Short Novel,” which was delivered virtually through a videoconference system. He is a Contributing Editor for the Handbook of Latin American Studies (Library of Congress). He has published an academic and critical book, Theory and Practice of Nouvelle (2003). Some titles of his works in fiction include the novel Sueños para una siesta (1986), the short story collections Siete y tres nueve (2003), Do outro lado do acaso (2018), and the short novel Mercedes (e-book, 2014)
Dr. Lola Orellano Norris is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Translation and Interim Dean of the Graduate School at Texas A&M International University (TAMIU). Since 1995, she has served TAMIU in various capacities, among them as foreign language instructor, tenured faculty, Director of the International Language Institute, and two-term President of the Faculty Senate. A firm believer in international engagement and student travel, she has co-led study abroad programs to Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as to Spain. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies with a concentration in Historical Linguistics from Texas A&M University (TAMU), an M.A. in Spanish Translation and Interpreting from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), an M.A. in Spanish Literature from TAMIU, and an undergraduate degree in German, Spanish, and English Translation from the Dolmetscherschule Zürich in Switzerland. Dr. Norris’ research interests include Translation Studies, Historical Linguistics, Golden Age Literature, Spanish Peninsular Literature, and Chicano Literature. Her book titled General Alonso de León’s Expeditions into Texas (1686-1690), published by A&M University Press in 2017, examines the diaries of the earliest Spanish military expeditions through Texas in search of La Salle’s French colony. She is currently writing a sequel that focuses on the survivors of Las Salle’s expedition. Dr. Norris received the TAMIU Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award in 2018 and the Senator Dr. Judith A. Zaffirini Faculty Award for Scholarship and Service in 2021. In 2022, she was recognized by the Texas A&M System for her teaching excellence by being inducted into the Chancellor’s Academy for Teacher Educators (CATE).
Philosophy
Languages
Dr. Julien Carriere is Assistant Professional of French & Italian. He earned his PhD in 20th century French literature from Louisiana State University in 2005 where he taught French and Italian language as a graduate student. He has published on Samuel Beckett and Dante in the bilingual journal Samuel Beckett Today/ Aujourd’hui and his translation of Macchiaveli’s L’asino appeared in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy in 2015. Dr. Carriere co-directs a study abroad program with his wife, Dr. Melody Carriere, every summer. The program focuses on language and culture in Paris, France and Florence, Italy in alternating years. Dr. Carriere is also a certified Level III Title IX investigator.
Dr. Melody Boyd Carrière is an Assistant Professional of French and Italian in the Department of Humanities at Texas A & M International University. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from Louisiana State University and her research interests include 19th and 20th century French and Francophone literature as well as Italian American literature. She has published articles and reviews on Italian American author Tina De Rosa and Caribbean author Jean Rhys. Each summer Dr. Carriere co-leads study abroad programs for TAMIU students in Paris, France and Florence, Italy.
Jean Paul Tadoum is an Associate Professional of French and German at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. He earned his PhD in French and German Studies from the University of Arizona in Tucson and a Masters of Arts (M.A.) degree in Germanistik (German Literature and Linguistics) from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Germany. His research focuses on the influences of African oral traditions and the literary transposition of semantic structures from African languages and cultures into the French language. He utilizes Chantal Zabus’ explanations of how the process of indigenization leads to relexification, the process by which Francophone African authors seek to display their linguistic innovation by attempting to merge their local African languages with the French language.
Contact
Department of Humanities
Academic Innovation Center (AIC) 313
Phone: 956.326.2470 | Fax: 956.326.2459