Associate Professor
Phone: 903.566.7371
Email: mstith@uttyler.edu
Building: CAS Office 127
Department: History
Matthew Stith
Degrees
- B.A., Missouri Southern State University
- M.A., University of Arkansas
- Ph.D., University of Arkansas
Biography
Matt Stith’s teaching and research interests cover a wide range of themes and periods in American history. He teaches courses on antebellum America and the Civil War era as well as thematic classes about environmental history, borderlands, military history, the West, the South, and the Vietnam War. Prof. Stith is happy to work with MA students interested in researching and writing about American environmental or military history. He is the author or editor of four books and is currently in the final stages of a fifth book.
Prof. Stith’s current project is titled Camp Ford’s Civil War: Nature, Community, and Captivity in the Dark Corner of the Confederacy, under contract with Cambridge University Press. It tells the story of the Confederate prison camp outside of Tyler that, at its peak, contained over 5,000 United States prisoners of war. His first book, Extreme Civil War: Guerilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Missippi Frontier (LSU Press, 2016), explores the nature and warfare dynamic within civilian-based warfare during the Civil War. He also co-edited, with G. David Schieffler, a volume titled Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War (LSU Press, 2025) in which his chapter examines nature and community at the Confederate prison at Camp Ford near Tyler.
Prof. Stith has also explored the connections between nature and war in the 20th century. His first project to this end led to a collection of essays, co-edited with Geoffrey Jensen, titled Beyond the Quagmire: New Interpretations of the Vietnam War (UNT Press, 2019), in which wrote about the interplay between the natural environment and soldier experience in South Vietnam. He also co-edited, with Mandy Link, a volume titled New Perspectives on the First World War: Beyond No Man’s Land (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) in which he wrote about rats and humans on the Western Front.
Prof. Stith’s third research interest centers on wild animals and culture in American history. He is in the writing stage of a book project tentatively titled American Ursus: A Cultural and Environmental History of Bears in the South. The book is a narrative history of black bears (Ursus americanus) and humans in the American South from prehistoric times to the present. He is also in the research stage of a book-length project that explores the role wildlife—from body lice to black bears—played in shaping and being shaped by the American Civil War.
When not teaching or writing about the natural world, Prof. Stith tries his best to get out into it, mostly by way of wandering around in the woods and fly fishin
Selected Publications:
Books:
Selected Articles and Chapters:
“War at Home: Nature, Agriculture, and a Confederate Community in Texas,” in G. David Schieffler and Matthew M. Stith, eds., Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, April 2025)
“Vermin in the Trenches: Rats, Lice, and the Ubiquitous War with Nature,” in Mandy Link and Matthew M. Stith, eds., New Perspectives on the First World War: Beyond No Man’s Land (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, April 2024)
“Irregular and Guerrilla Warfare during the Civil War,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. Jon Butler (New York: Oxford University Press, January 2023) [6,000+ word, peer-reviewed essay]
“The Natural Environment and the American Military Experience in Vietnam,” in Geoffrey W. Jensen and Matthew M. Stith, eds., Beyond the Quagmire: New Interpretations of the Vietnam Conflict (Denton: University of North Texas Press, March 2019)
“Knights of the Brush: Guerrilla Warfare and the Environment in the Trans-Mississippi Theater,” in Barton Myers and Brian McKnight, eds., The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts During the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, April 2017)
“Race and Irregular Warfare on the Trans-Mississippi Border, 1861-1865” in Geoffrey Jensen, ed., The Routledge History of Race and the American Military (New York: Routledge Press, 2016)
"'Denizens of the Forest': Hunting Black Bears and Identity in the Mississippi Delta," Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies (Winter 2015)
“‘The Deplorable Condition of the Country’: Nature, Society, and War on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier,” Civil War History 58 (September 2012)
“Guerrillas, Civilians, and the Union Response in Jasper County, Missouri, 1861-1865,” Military History of the West 38 (2008)
“‘Women Locked the Doors, Children Screamed, and Men Trembled in their Boots’: Black Bears, People, and Extirpation in Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 66 (Spring 2007). Winner of the Violet Gingles Award for Best Essay, Arkansas Historical Association; Nominated for the Alice Hamilton Prize, American Society for Environmental History.