William G. Thomas III is the dean of the College of Letters and Science at Montana State University. Prior to joining Montana State University in 2025, he was the associate dean for research and graduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where from 2005 to 2025 he held the Angle Chair in the Humanities and was a professor of history and a fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
Dr. Thomas specializes in U.S. history and among other honors has been named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and a Lincoln Prize Finalist. He is the author of A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War, which received the 2021 Mark Lynton History Prize and the 2021 Society for Historians of the Early Republic Book Prize. In 2023, he was elected vice president of the American Historical Association, and in that role leads the research and scholarship division. Thomas is a graduate of Trinity College (Connecticut) and currently serves on the Trinity College Board of Trustees. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia.
Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. Taylor's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Orion Magazine, Literary Hub, and has appeared in numerous anthologies.
Brorby is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. Taylor has been interviewed about his work on MSNBC and NPR and regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economics, climate change, queerness, and disability. He is an assistant professor at Montana State University, where he teaches nonfiction writing and is the Haynes Faculty Fellow.
