Thomas W. Cutrer earned his B.A. in history at the Louisiana State University in 1969 and, after three years’ service as an intelligence officer in the United States Air Force, returned to LSU for a master’s degree in English literature, which he completed in 1974. In 1980 he was awarded the Ph.D. in the American Civilization Program at the University of Texas. Doctor Cutrer then spent a decade in public history, first as curator of history at the University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio, and then as associate director of the University of Texas Center for Studies in Texas History and managing editor of the Handbook of Texas at the Texas State Historical Association.
Professor Cutrer came to ASU’s West campus in 1990. His scholarly work focuses on the cultural history of the American South and Nineteenth Century U.S. military history, especially the American Civil War.
A prolific author, Dr. Cutrer has received awards for his books Parnassus on the Mississippi: The Southern Review and the Baton Rouge Literary Community, 1935-1942 and Ben McCulloch and the Frontier Military Tradition.
Dr. Cutrer’s other books include Longstreet’s Aide: The Civil War Letters of Maj. Thomas J. Goree , “Our Trust is in the God of Battles”: The Civil War Letters of Robert F. Bunting, Chaplain, Eighth Texas Cavalry, The Mexican War Diary and Correspondence of George B. McClellan, Oh, What a Loansome Time I Had: The Civil War Letters of Major William Moxley and Emily Moxley, and Empire of Sand: The Struggle for the Southwest, 1862. He also coedited, with T. Michael Parrish, Brothers in Gray: The Civil War Letters of the Pierson Family .
.Professor Cutrer's history of the Civil War in the trans-Mississippi West, Theater of a Separate War, will be published in March 2017 in the University of North Carolina Press’s Littlefield History of the Civil War Era series. He is also an advisory editor of Military History of the West, published by the University of North Texas.
