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Ron Tyler is the retired Director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. He is former Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of the Texas State Historical Association and the Center for Studies in Texas History at the University, during which time he was the editor-in-chief of The New Handbook of Texas (6 vols.; 1996 and now online) and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. Before moving to Austin he served as Curator of History and Director of Public Programs at the Carter.

He has also published numerous works in the areas of Texas, Western American, and American art and history. Major publications include Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist as Explorer (1999), Prints of the West (1994), Audubon’s Great National Work: The Royal Octavo Edition of The Birds of America (1993), Views of Texas: The Watercolors of Sarah Ann Hardinge, 1852- 1856 (1988), Visions of America: Pioneer Artists in a New Land (1983), and Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist on the Oregon Trail (1982), Posada’s Mexico (1979), The Rodeo of John Addison Stryker (1977), The Mexican War: A Lithographic Record (1975), The Cowboy (1975), The Big Bend: A History of the Last Texas Frontier (1975), The Slave Narratives of Texas (1974), and Santiago Vidaurri and the Southern Confederacy (1973; translated and published in Spanish in 2002), Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), The Art of Texas: 250 Years (editor, TCU Press, 2019), Texas Lithographs: A Century of History in Images (University of Texas Press, 2023). He edited the Southwestern Historical Quarterly from 1986 to 2004 and co-wrote Texas: Crossroads of North America (Cengage, 2015) with Jesús F. de la Teja and Nancy Beck Young.

Honors include the Capitan Alonzo de León medal for contributions to Mexican history from the Sociedad de Historia, Geografía, y Estadística de Nuevo León (2002), Best Contribution to Knowledge from the Texas Institute of Letters (1995) and Best Book of the Year from the American Historical Print Collections Society (1995) for Prints of the West; Best Texas Book of the Year from the Texas State Historical Association (1976) for The Big Bend; and a D.H.L. from Austin College (1986).

Tyler is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, the Philosophical Society of Texas, the Institute of Texas Letters, and Phi Beta Kappa.