Assistant Professor
Office: TMH 212
Phone: 512.245.4367
Email: caseyn@txstate.edu
Education:
PhD, U.S. History, Stanford University, 2016
MA, History, University of Washington, Seattle, 2009
BA, History, California State University, Long Beach, 2007
Research Interests:
African American history, Mexican American history, California and the West, Civil Rights History, Social Movement History, Urban History, and Political History.
Dr. Casey D. Nichols is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Texas State University. Before starting at Texas State in Fall 2019, Dr. Nichols taught at CSU, East Bay, CSU, Long Beach, and Dickinson College. At Texas State, she teaches African American History, US Social Justice and Reform Movements, and US History 1877 to Date.
As a historian, she specializes in the areas of African American history, Mexican American history, U.S. Urban history, civil rights, and social justice. Her recent book with the University of North Carolina Press, Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post-Civil Rights America, examines post-1964 antipoverty policy with a specific focus on how these policies shaped African American and Mexican American activist movements in Los Angeles and brought new significance to Black-Brown relations as U.S. racial paradigm. Her Pacific Historical Review (PHR) article titled, ‘”The Magna Carta to Liberate Our Cities’: African Americans, Mexican Americans, and the Model Cities Program in Los Angeles,” was published in Summer 2021 and examines the impact of the Chicano Movement on the U.S. federal government’s Model Cities Program.
Dr. Nichols has received several research and teaching honors. She holds a Golden Apple Award for teaching, a Presidential Distinction Award in teaching, and an Achievement Award for research from Texas State University. In 2022, she received an Emerging Poverty Scholar Fellowship from the Institute for Research on Poverty. Her research has also been supported by The Policy Academies, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Foundation, and the Huntington Library.