Faculty
Ring, Natalie J.
Associate Professor , HIST/HUHI
Office: JO 5.424
Phone: 972-883-2365
Email: nring@utdallas.edu
Areas of Specialization: U.S. Southern History, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, New Directions in Southern Studies, African-American History
Education: PhD, University of California San Diego, 2003
BA, Amherst College, 1990
Dr. Ring completed her B.A. in American Studies and Music at Amherst College and her Ph.D. in History at the University of California San Diego. Prior to arriving at the University of Texas she taught for two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. She is the author of The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 which 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. Research on the book has been funded by the Smithsonian Institution, the American Historical Association, the Rockefeller Center Archives, the UNC Chapel Hill Manuscripts Division, and the Copeland Fellow program at Amherst College. Dr. Ring is also the co-editor The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South.
In addition, she is the author of "Inventing the Tropical South: Race, Region, and the Colonial Model," Mississippi Quarterly 56 (Fall 2003); "Linking Regional and Global Spaces in Pursuit of Southern Distinctiveness," American Literature 78 (December 2006); "Mapping Regional and Imperial Geographies: Tropical Diseases in the U. S. South," in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); and "The 'New Race Question': The Problem of Poor Whites and the Color Line," in The Folly of Jim Crow.
Other essays in progress for publication include an essay on the "Tropics" which will be forthcoming in Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson, eds., Critical Terms for Southern Studies (University of Georgia Press) and "New Turn or U-Turn? The U. S. South in a Global Context" which will be forthcoming in History Compass Journal. Dr. Ring has recently begun working on a second monograph, The 'Bloodiest Prison in the South': From Slave Plantation to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, and writing an introduction for the reprint of Edwin Mims, The Advancing South: Stories of Progress and Reaction (1926).