Off the Record with UT Press

Benjamin Marquez is the author of Democratizing Texas Politics: Race, Identity, and Mexican American Empowerment, 1945-2002 (University of Texas Press 2014). Marquez is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Democratizing Texas Politics covers 50 years of Texas political history, but also the changing institutional power of parties, organizations, and groups in s...

In Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire (University of Texas Press, 2014), Jason Ruiz explores the role of a distinct group of actors in the relationship between the United States and Mexico: American travelers, travel writers and photographers who visited and worked in Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With...

What is the interplay between the physical human body and the body politic? This question is at the heart of Ellen J. Amster‘s Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 (University of Texas Press, 2013). In this pioneering, interdisciplinary study, Professor Amster explores the French campaign to colonize Morocco through medicine. It is through medic...

Born in Kentucky, raised in Ohio, apprenticed in Los Angeles, Dwight Yoakam is not your typical mainstream country music star. Indeed, his honky-tonk style of country has always been a throwback to an earlier era, one in which Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris, and Buck Owens ruled the airwaves. It seems an anomaly that Yoakam was at his commercial peak in the days of Garth Brooks and Brooks and Dunn....

In 2005, Amina Wadud led a mixed-gender congregation of Muslims in prayer. This event became the focal point of substantial media attention and highlighted some of the tensions within the Muslim community. However, this prayer gathering was the culmination of a series of events and embodied several ongoing intra-Muslim debates. In American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than...