Bryan Giemza, Ph.D., J.D., is Associate Professor of Humanities and Literature in the Honors College, having joined the faculty in 2019. Bryan served as public scholar for the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World, and is currently the Provost's Fellow for Outreach and Engagement (2022-2023). He is the creator and director of a campus-wide resilience initiative, housed in the Honors College, called Creating Livable Futures, conceived in collaboration with writer and former Honors College Faculty member Barry Lopez.

Before coming to Texas Tech he was Director of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bryan is an interdisciplinary teacher and thinker whose courses span American studies, literature, and history. For example, his course, “In Search of Texas Beauty,” invited students to recover the natural, literary, and human history of Texas apples, and resulted in the recovery of an apple variety not seen in the state for a century. His teaching has been recognized by the Virginia State Council of Higher Education's Outstanding Faculty Award, deemed “the Commonwealth's highest honor for faculty,” and by Tech students with the Mortarboard Apple Polishing Award for Excellence in Teaching.

He is author or an editor of seven academic books on American literary and cultural history, eleven book chapters, and more than thirty published articles and reviews. His passion for writing that brings interdisciplinary scholarly curiosity to broad audiences is reflected in multiple writing awards and fellowships. A recent finalist for the Doris Betts Prize in Fiction, Bryan has served as an editor for DocSouth Books from UNC Press. He is author of the literary history, Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South, which received the South Atlantic Modern Language Association's Studies Award. His forthcoming books include Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds (Bloomsbury, June, 2023) and an edited essay collection on disinformation, Across the Canyons: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Divisive Communications in West Texas and Beyond (2024).  

As principal investigator of grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities, among others, he has led a variety of public humanities projects concerning U.S. history and culture. Bryan is deeply invested in promoting community engaged scholarship and participatory research, and received the Bryan Service Award in 2018 for his work on an exchanged-based archives project called “Maya from the Margins.” His “Archivist in a Backpack” kit has attracted global interest. Bryan helped to develop, and continues to works closely with, the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum.

 

 

Areas of Expertise

 

American studies, literature, and history, environmental law and policy, and information science