Brennan Gardner Rivas, Assistant Director

Brennan Gardner Rivas joined the Clements Center as assistant director in 2026. Brennan is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States and the American Southwest, specializing in legal history and gun studies. Her work seeks to excavate the political and cultural context of historical gun laws and gun violence, underscoring the long American tradition of regulating weapons in the name of public safety. Because Brennan’s research speaks to current controversies over the meaning of the right to bear arms, she has served as an expert witness in numerous Second Amendment cases across the country.

Brennan has published articles and essays in Southwestern Historical Quarterly, UC Davis Law Review, New Histories of of Gun Rights and Regulations, the Routledge Handbook of American Violence (forthcoming, with Evan Turiano), as well as blogs like Second Thoughts, SHEAR’s Panorama, and Washington Post: Made by History. More information about her work can be found on her website.

Brennan is a former fellow at the Clements Center. She held a Bill & Rita Clements Fellowship in the Study of Southwestern America (2020-2021) for her current book project, The Revolver Must Go: The Rise and Fall of a Gun Control Movement in Texas. The manuscript is under contract with Yale University Press.

PhD in History, Texas Christian University

Email: bnrivas@smu.edu