B Movies and Bad History: Rodeo Moo-vies

Don Graham is the J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include Southwestern American Literature/ Film, and Nineteenth & Twentieth Century American Literature/Culture. In 2005 Graham received the Best General Criticism Award from the City/Regional Magazine Association, for his literary columns in Texas Monthly. Graham's major publications include No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy, Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas; Kings of Texas: The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire, and in the spring of 2018 he released the book GIANT: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film.  

Michael Wise is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas and an expert on the history of animal-human relationships in the American West. He is the author of Producing Predators: Wolves, Work, and Conquest in the Northern Rockies, a book about wolves and ranching that puts meat and carnivorousness at the center of America’s environmental and cultural histories. Wise is currently writing a new book on the history of western films and teaches a popular course titled “Hollywood and the Wild West” that provides a critical study of western films from an historical perspective.