(an extended cv “vita” for Dr. Wranosky can be found here)
Dr. Jessica Brannon-Wranosky holds the Distinguished Professor of Digital Humanities & History at Texas A&M University-Commerce. She specializes in women, gender and sexuality history and digital research methods.
Her expertise is leading large public facing history projects, some of which include her roles associate producer and lead historical advisor of a forthcoming documentary–Shaking It Up: The Life and Times of Liz Carpenter—about White House executive and national feminist leader, Liz Carpenter, produced and directed by Abby Ginzberg and Christy Carpenter—to premiere at SXSW 2024 (South By Southwest Festival); central production roles in the 2020 PBS documentary Citizens At Last: Texas Women Fight for the Vote, based largely on her forthcoming monograph, co-produced by Ellen Temple and Nancy Schiesari and directed by Nancy Schiesari. Dr. Wranosky has since co-produced, with Temple and Schiesari, a series of five short films focused on Texas suffragists forthcoming in 2024.
She is the Project Director for Humanities Texas secondary educational curriculum and resources initiative and a travelling—highlighting Texas suffrage history. She is co-editor with Merline Pitre, Bruce Glasrud, and Cecilia Gutierrez-Venable for the forthcoming anthology, Centuries of Voices: Portraits of Black Women in Texas History, a print anthology of over 70 biographical articles (TAMU Press). Her forthcoming monograph focuses on the role Texas and Texans played in the woman suffrage movement at the southern regional and national levels.
Starting in 2016, she served as the Founding Project Director for the Handbook of Texas Women, a statewide public educational outreach and digital content development project, which remains the largest Handbook of Texas Online Special Project and arguably one of the largest Texas women’s history projects to date. From 2016-2019 she edited three ebooks, Texas Women and the Vote (2019), Women Across Texas History, Volume 1: Nineteenth Century and Before (2016), and Women Across Texas History, Volume 2: Early Twentieth Century (2017), all published by the Texas State Historical Association. From 2009-2014, she was the digital media author for W. W. Norton’s Give Me Liberty by Eric Foner, the top selling U. S. History college textbook on the market.
Her research on women gaining the right to vote has been featured in a variety of formats, including —at the 2019 Organization of American Historians commemorative panel marking the century since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment; as part of a symposium and connected year-long exhibit running June 2019 through August 2020 at the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum in Austin (https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/visit/exhibits/sister-suffragists ); a series by the Texas Standard radio show, “100 Years: Voices Of Women Voters” (http://www.texasstandard.org/100years/); an article she co-authored with Cecilia Gutierrez Venable, “To Lead and To Vote: Black Woman Suffragists and the NAACP in the South,” in the Summer/Fall 2019 issue of the The Black History Bulletin [a journal for educators published by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History]; and as editor of Texas Women and the Vote [an open source eBook published by the Texas State Historical Association]. She has a forthcoming monograph book that focuses on the role Texas and Texans played in the woman suffrage movement at the southern regional and national levels. The PBS Documentary, Citizens At Last: Texas Women Fight for the Vote, produced by Ellen C. Temple and produced and directed by Nancy Schiesari, is based on pieces of the forthcoming book, as is the Humanities Texas travelling exhibit, Citizens At Last, and five forthcoming biographical short films for which she is co-producer with Temple and Schiesari.
Other work by Dr. Wranosky can be found listed on her vita elsewhere on this site, and include numerous academic journals, anthologies, and a variety of online digital publications and exhibits. Examples of her publications include Impeached: The Removal of Texas Governor James E. Ferguson, A Centennial Examination co-edited with Bruce A. Glasrud, (Texas A&M University Press, 2017); and essays by her in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives in the Southern Women: Their Lives and Times Series (University of Georgia Press, 2015)—a 2016 winner of the Liz Carpenter Award and Discovering Texas History (Oklahoma University Press, 2014).
Dr. Wranosky has received several awards for her research and contribution to the field including TSHA’s John H. Jenkins Award in 2015 and the Texas Oral History Association’s Best Article Award in 2016.
Jessica Brannon-Wranosky • Historian 