University Libraries

Andrew J. Torget, Ph.D. is a historian of nineteenth-century North America at the University of North Texas. Torget’s work has revolved around two intersecting themes: the expansion of the American South into the West, and developing new digital methods for research, scholarship, and teaching.

Torget received his Ph.D. and M.A. in American history from the University of Virginia. In addition to his graduate work, Dr. Torget received his Bachelor of Arts in History from Texas A&M University.

Torget began work in digital scholarship at the University of Virginia. During his years at UVA, he served as the co-editor and manager for the “Valley of the Shadow” project and worked as a project manager in the Virginia Center for Digital History. While a graduate student, he also developed the “Texas Slavery Project” as an experiment in how new visualization methods might provide new insights into the westward expansion of the American South.

Following that work, he became the founding director for the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, where he developed projects like “Voting America: United States Politics, 1840-2008” and the “History Engine: Tools for Collaborative Education and Research.”

In 2009, he joined the history department at the University of North Texas, where he teaches courses on the U. S.-Mexico borderlands, American expansion, Texas, slavery, and the intersections of the American South and West. At UNT, he has worked closely with the university’s digitization lab and computer science department on several projects, such as the NEH-funded “Mapping Texts: Visualizing American Historical Newspapers” in partnership with Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. In 2011 he was named the inaugural David J. Weber Research Fellow at the Clements Center for the Study of the Southwest at Southern Methodist University.

Torget’s most recent book is Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850, which tells the remarkable story of how global economic shifts during the first half of the nineteenth century transformed northern Mexico into the American Southwest. Featured on National Public Radio, Texas Monthly, and the Dallas Morning News, Seeds of Empire won twelve book prizes, awards, and honors. In August 2018, Torget and a group of history students set the Guinness World Record for the Longest History Lesson, teaching for more than 26 hours consecutively.

The Dallas Morning News named him a finalist for their “Texan of the Year” award in 2021 for the “uncommon, inspirational impact” of his work. In 2023, he served as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Germany, where he won the Berninghausen Prize for Outstanding Teaching at the University of Bremen.