Toby Glenn Bates

Dr. Toby Bates joined the faculty of Mississippi State University - Meridian in August of 2008. He teaches a broad range of upper-division and graduate-level history courses. From the spring of 2009 until the present, the university continues to recognize Dr. Bates with teaching and research awards in the Division of Arts and Sciences. Additionally, the city's newspaper of record, The Meridian Star, awarded Dr. Bates the Reader's Choice Teacher Award. Recently, the Mississippi Humanities Council named Professor Bates the 2021 Mississippi Humanities Council Teacher of the Year at Mississippi State University for his outstanding work in the humanities.

Academically active with university-press publications, numerous articles and multiple book reviews, Dr. Bates is honored that as recent as the fall of 2024,his 2011 book; The Reagan Rhetoric: History and Memory in 1980s America, is still utilized by many universities when offering courses on the presidency of Ronald Reagan. When considering teaching and research, Dr. Bates states, "I hope being good at one makes me better at the other." Accordingly, he has presented portions of his research at no less than (17) conferences on three (3) continents, including the University of Newcastle, Australia as well as the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Such travel produced a playful passport competition with his ordained-minister son, Joseph, who possesses a passport that enjoys stamps from England, France, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Panama, Columbia, Brazil, and Peru while Dr. Bates' passport reveals Australia, England, and Mexico.

If you see Dr. Bates, make sure to ask him about the time he served as an impromptu guide for CBS news anchor, Dan Rather in Oxford England, or avoided a south Pacific shark attack while swimming off the coast of Newcastle Australia, or his Hollywood trip starring in a documentary detailing 1980s America, or his ongoing sermons from a Mississippi church pulpit.

Dr. Bates lives in Mississippi with his wife of 33 years, Mary Catherine, herself a oft-awarded nursing home administrator. No matter Dr. Bates many well-deserved academic accolades, he will quickly tell you that his greatest blessing is his family: a supportive spouse of over three decades, an ordained-minister son and beautiful daughter-in-law that has provided Dr. Bates his first two grandchildren with a third on the way, and finally his daughter the engineer and Physics Ph.D. son-in-law, whose both occupations Dr. Bates still does not understand.