Assistant Professor
Phone: 903.566.7371
Email: tseiter@uttyler.edu
Building: CAS Office 130
Department: History
Tim Seiter
Degrees
- Ph.D., Southern Methodist University
- M.A., Southern Methodist University
- B.A., University of Houston
- A.A., Alvin Community College
Biography
Tim Seiter studies colonial Texas and recently put the finishing touches on his first book, Wrangling Pelicans (University of Texas Press), which describes life as a presidial soldier in eighteenth-century Spanish Texas. Instead of focusing on equipment, salaries, and troop numbers, as is typical, Dr. Seiter’s book examines the full spectrum of these frontier soldiers’ everyday lives—tasks that ranged from guarding horses to gambling away their equipment. This text will hit shelves Fall of 2025.
Dr. Seiter is now writing a general history of the Karankawa peoples of the Texas Gulf entitled “Persistent Peoples.” Past histories of Karankawas label these Natives as “the meanest, greediest, laziest, most treacherous, lecherous, vicious, cowardly, insolent aborigines of the Southwest, the scourge of the frontier.” A fresh history is needed. His book, besides reorienting the Karankawas’ image, places a spotlight on the Karankawa people today who are reclaiming their land and revitalizing their culture. Instead of being “extinct” as previously claimed, the Karankawas persistently survive.