Rate My Professor Brent Campney

Brent Campney is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies from Emory University in 2007, with a dissertation titled “And This in Free Kansas’: Racist Violence, Black and White Resistance, Geographical Particularity, and the ‘Free State’ Narrative in Kansas, 1865 to 1914.” He received a Master of Arts in American Studies from the University of Kansas in 2001, with a thesis on Jim Crow practices in Lawrence, Kansas from 1945 to 1961, and a Bachelor of Arts in American Culture from the University of Michigan in 1998. Campney began his academic career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Texas-Pan American in 2008, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014, and continued at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley as Associate Professor from 2015 to 2019 before advancing to full Professor in 2019. During his graduate studies at Emory University, he held the A. Worley Brown Fellowship in Southern Studies in 2005-2006 and a Graduate Fellowship from 2001 to 2005.

Campney's research focuses on the history of anti-Black violence in Kansas and the Midwest, racist violence, repression, and resistance, Jim Crow practices and the civil rights movement in Kansas, police brutality and Mexican American civil rights in Texas, anti-Asian violence and international diplomacy in the American West, and lynching and mob violence. He is the author of the monographs This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927 (University of Illinois Press, 2015; paperback 2018) and Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest (University of Illinois Press, 2019). His peer-reviewed journal articles appear in outlets including Western Historical Quarterly, Civil War History, Great Plains Quarterly, Indiana Magazine of History, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Pacific Historical Review, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Journal of Southern History, Kansas History, and Southwestern Historical Quarterly. Recent publications include “‘The Explosive Ingredients Are Here’: Mexican American Municipal Electoral Challenges in South Texas, 1963-1965” (Western Historical Quarterly, 2024), “‘Stamping Out Segregation in Kansas’: Jim Crow Practices and the Postwar Black Freedom Struggle” (Great Plains Quarterly, 2023), “‘Police Brutality and Mexican American Families in Texas, 1945-1980” (The Annals, 2021), “‘A White-and-Negro Environment which is Seldom Spotlighted’: The Twilight of Jim Crow in Urban Kansas, 1960-1965” (Pacific Historical Review, 2021), and “‘Standing in the Crater of a Volcano’: Anti-Chinese Violence and International Diplomacy in the American West” (California History, 2021). Campney has donated research collections to UTRGV archives, including materials on race relations in South Texas and the Valley Iconography Collection of photographs documenting signage in the Lower Rio Grande Valley.