Jimmy L. Bryan Jr.

Professor in the Department of History
Director, The Center for History & Culture of Southeast Texas & the Upper Gulf Coast
Editor, Texas Gulf Historical and Biographical Record
Began working at Lamar University in 2001
Interviewed by Vidisha Barua Worley on 04/26/2023

Director Jimmy Bryan presented five students with the Judith Linsley Award for best presentation on Southeast Texas and the Greater Gulf region at Lamar University's Expo in April 2023.

‘In the Fall of 2007, I was hired as an assistant professor of history. Lamar University has been a huge part of my career, as a scholar and as a teacher. My personal research does not have a lot to do with Southeast Texas. But, of course, I was appointed to the directorship of the Center. It was the Fall of 2021. I was asked to step in after Judith Lindsley retired. What we do with the Center, we sponsor these scholarships and creativity that helps us enrich our understanding of Southeast Texas and the Greater Gulf region. We do this in a variety of different ways. One is, we sponsor an annual symposium each year, the Greater Gulf Symposium. The first was in 2022 and it was themed around the issues of slavery, emancipation, and abolition. This year, we did the symposium on the indigenous Gulf. We invited several scholars to come and workshop their research and essays, and they would spend the summer revising the essays and submit them for peer-review for publication in the Texas Gulf Historical and Biographical Record. I took over as editor back in 2012. This has been a publication since 1965, I believe. It is the Texas Gulf Historical Society, a local group in Beaumont. In 2011, they arranged with the History Department of Lamar to take over editorial and publication duties for the Record. It has been hard to find copies to publish in the Record. We put together the symposium with the idea to help us generate copies for the journal. We published our first volume based on the symposium just this last month (March 2023). It’s a lot of work, getting the copy, editing the copy, sending articles off for peer review. I am also the book review editor. I find the books and send them to book reviewers. I am also responsible for laying out the actual copy, the typesetting if you will. I would certainly consider my colleagues here in the history department as my friends. Should I ever part from Lamar, they would still be good friends that I could count on. We have a very good relationship, and we support each other in our career and research.’