Dr. Gene B. Preuss – Regional Director / Board Member
Regional Area: Texas
Areas of Specialization: Oral history, Mexican-American history,
African-American history and Texas history.
Gene B. Preuss, earned his Ph. D. in History from Texas Tech University in 2004.
Since 2004, Preuss has been an Assistant Professor of History at the University of
Houston-Downtown, where in addition to teaching courses on Mexican-American and
African-American history and Texas history, he serves as the Achieving the Dream Core
Team Leader, a committee focusing on student success issues. He has been an editor for
H-ORALHIST since 1997.
Preuss has presented his research, spoke on panels, and chaired sessions at the
Texas State Historical Association, Oral History Association, Southwest Social Science
Association, East Texas Historical Association, West Texas Historical Association, and
the Organization of Education Historians. He is on the board of the West Texas
Historical Association, edited the Texas Oral History Association Newsletter for 2 years,
and has been active in Phi Alpha Theta.
He is the author of To Get a Better School System: One Hundred Years of
Education Reform in Texas (Texas A&M, 2009). He collaborated with Alan H. Stein on a
chapter on oral history and natural disasters, “Oral History, Folklore, and Katrina” which
was published in There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and
Hurricane Katrina, edited by Chester Hartman and Gregory Squire (Routledge, 2006)
and republished in Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race and
Public Policy Reader, edited by Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008). He contributed a chapter on public education, “Public Schools Come
of Age,” in Twentieth-Century Texas: A Social and Cultural History, edited by John
Storey and Mary Kelley (University of North Texas, 2008). He is currently researching
the changes that took place during the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush
administrations while Lauro F. Cavazos was Secretary of Education, and is also working
on a history of African-American schools in Texas.
You can reach Gene at: preussg@uhd.edu