Mylynka Kilgore Cardona, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Public History Program Coordinator, Graduate Advisor

How people interact with the past in public spaces is not only her personal interest, but her research. Mylynka Kilgore Cardona seeks to understand how and why people travel and explore and looks to the past for answers. A transatlantic historian with a background in historical cartography, Cardona worked for the Texas General Land Office where she curated exhibits on state and county maps. She then joined the Department of History in 2017. Since then, Cardona has taught courses in cartography, historical geography, world travel and travel writing, and gender studies. Cardona also serves as the Coordinator for the Public History Graduate Certificate. She is currently writing a book manuscript that studies nineteenth-century Dutch woman Alexine Tinne who traveled and explored the Nile River in the 1850s and 1860s.

A Conversation with Dr. Cardona

What has been your favorite course to teach?

While I always enjoy the deeper dives that upper-division and graduate courses take into specific topics in history, teaching the U.S. History survey courses are my favorite. In them, I get to not only teach my widest possible audience, one who is generally there begrudgingly because they HAVE to be there for their core courses, but I also get to show students that U.S. History is anything but the old, dead and done thing they think it is. So many students come into HIST1301/1302 with the preconceived notion that history is boring and my job is to show them it is not while having conversations about what the USA is and how we got this way.

What draws you to your discipline?

History always interested me because it is about people. People do wonderful things, and terrible things, and figuring out why things happened and how they happened is exciting. I love uncovering new aspects of a subject and drawing connections between things and then sharing them.

Tell us about a project you are currently working on or recently completed.

I am currently in the process of writing a book manuscript about nineteenth-century Dutch woman Alexine Tinne who traveled and explored on the Nile River and in Northern Africa in the 1850s and 1860s. It is looking at how and why people at the time traveled and explored, what the gendered expectations were at the time, and how Tinne transgressed them.

Educational Background

• Ph.D., Transatlantic History, University of Texas at Arlington, 2015
• MA, History, University of Texas at Arlington, 2008
• BA, History, University of Texas at Arlington, 2006

Academic Positions

• Assistant Professor, History, Texas A&M University-Commerce, 2018-present
• Adjunct Professor, History and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Arlington, 2015

Awards and Honors

• Excellence in Teaching Award, TAMUC Chapter of the National Society of Leadership and Success, 2019

Research Interests

• Transatlantic History
• Public History
• Historical Geography and Cartography
• Gender Studies

Professional Organizations

• Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
• National Council for Public History
• Society for the History of Discoveries
• Texas Map Society

Selected Publications

• “Mapping Texas: From Frontier to the Lone Star State, An Exhibit of Maps from the Texas General Land Office and the Frank and Carol Holcomb Collection …,” Co-Authored with José Adrián Barragán-Álvarez, Ph.D., Neatline: A Newsletter of the Texas Map Society, (Fall 2016), pp. 14-19.
• “Alexine Tinne: Nineteenth-Century Explorer of Africa,” Terrae Incognitae: Journal of the Society for the History of Discoveries. Special Edition on Africa. Vol. 44 No. 2, September 2012, 124–38.
• “Remembering Marie Antoinette: The Martyr, the Whore, and the Icon,” Cultural Constructions II: Power and Memory Bi-annual Symposium Proceedings, Vol. 1. 2009

Featured Courses

History 1302 U.S. History from 1865
History 303 Historical Geography
History 421 Cartography