William G. Thomas III is the dean of the College of Letters and Science at Montana State University. Prior to joining Montana State in 2025, he was the associate dean for research and graduate education in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where from 2005 to 2025 he held the Angle Chair in the Humanities and was a professor of history and a fellow of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. He served as chair of the University of Nebraska’s history department from 2010 to 2016. Thomas specializes in US history and among other honors has been named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and a Lincoln Prize Finalist. He is the author of A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War, which received the 2021 Mark Lynton History Prize and the 2021 Society for Historians of the Early Republic Book Prize. Thomas co-founded and directed the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia, where he was an assistant and associate professor of history, and a co-editor of the award-winning Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War. His research has been supported with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation. In 2023, he was elected vice president of the American Historical Association, and in that role leads the research and scholarship division. Thomas is a graduate of Trinity College (Connecticut) and currently serves on the Trinity College Board of Trustees. He received his MA and PhD in history from the University of Virginia.
William G. Thomas III
