Faculty Profiles

Dr. Casey D. Nichols is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Texas State University. She holds a BA in history from California State University, Long Beach, an MA from the University of Washington, and a PhD in history from Stanford University. Before starting at Texas State in the Fall of 2019, Dr. Nichols taught at CSU-East Bay, CSU-Long Beach, and Dickinson College. As a historian, she specializes in African American history, Mexican American history, urban history, civil rights history, and policy history. Her recent book with the University of North Carolina Press titled, 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 social justice movements in Los Angeles and brought new significance to Black-Brown relations as US 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 the Summer of 2021. This article examines the impact of the Chicano Movement on the US federal government's Model Cities Program. Dr. Nichols has received several competitive grants, including the Emerging Poverty Scholar Fellowship from the Institute for Research on Poverty, a Liberal Arts Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Moody Research Grant from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Foundation, the E. Peter Mauk, Jr./Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. Fellowship from the Huntington Library, and a project development grant from The Policy Academies.