Graduating from UT-Austin in 1969 with a dual major in history and German literature, Dr. James C. Kearney received a cross-disciplinary Ph.D. in history and German from the Department of Germanic Studies at UT-Austin and taught German at Katy High School for a number of years.
In addition to Lebensbild, his publications include Nassau Plantation: The Evolution of a Texas German Slave Plantation; Friedrichsburg: The Colony of the German Fürstenverein; Detlef Dunt’s Travels to Texas in 1834; No Hope for Heaven; No Fear of Hell: Private Justice in Colorado County; and an annotated translation of W.A. Trenckmann’s Texas Civil War novel, Die Lateiner am Possum Creek.
A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he won the Summerfield G. Roberts Award for Friedrichsburg and the H. Bailey Carroll Award for his July 2019 Southwestern Historical Quarterly article, “The Murder of Conrad Caspar Rordorf: Art, Violence, and Intrigue on the Texas Frontier.”
