“It is an honor to be nominated as President-Elect of the WHA. The WHA has been my institutional home. It has been a pleasure to see what we do in the WHA shape people’s understanding of the United States. I look forward to working on making the WHA an inclusive space for all.”

I have always been grateful for the WHA and the pathways opened by the New Western Historians when I was coming up in the 1990s. My first WHA was Lincoln 1996, where as a grad student I moderated a panel featuring senior historians on “Significant to Whom?: Many Histories View the West”—because Virginia Scharff invited me. Intimidated, the opportunity lifted me up, and I try to do my part to keep that renewing spirit of the WHA going. I'm an environmental historian of the Pacific Slope and have participated in the ongoing work the field is doing on its trouble with whiteness, to be more attendant to issues of social difference and Indigeneity. My books include Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the Wilderness of Modern America, and A Companion to American Environmental History. Co-chairing the 2013 Tucson program committee, Kathy Brosnan and I added sessions to confront the anti-immigrant politics that erupted that year in Arizona. Lately, I have enjoyed serving on the Athearn Committee and co-organizing panels with colleagues in all phases of their careers. The great new work I'm seeing from all corners makes me want to say that the future of this field I love is in good hands.

But I also worry about the future of our revitalized, inclusive and expansive Western history, for there are those who are reaching out to choke and muzzle us. Troubling signs of this overreach include the institutional disrespect shown to luminaries in our field, the exploitation of adjunct faculty and the slow-suffocation of many departments, large and small (like mine at a SLAC). The know-nothing attack thinks American history can best be taught as a garden of white-man statues featuring Boone and Crockett and through mandating a representation of American history as holy exceptionalism free of racism or sexism. This all might be comical if its narrow vehemence weren't backed by so much seized political power and budgetary control, seemingly hell-bent on taking away free inquiry and snuffing out the conditions in which critical historical exploration can take place, both in the profession and in the public realm that is the still beating heart of our aspiring democracy. As a council member, I would refrain from fulminating against the historiographic sins of “presentism” and instead join with others to confront the clear and present dangers we currently face.

I am an Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah (UU). My research interests include public history and histories of the U.S. West, masculinity, labor, racial formations, war and society, and Pacific settler colonialism.

I’m the author or editor of four books, including Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front (University of Chicago Press, 2013), winner of the Philip Taft Labor History and the AHA’s Pacific Coast Branch book awards, and Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (Routledge, 2001). My current book project uses Aotearoa/New Zealand as a case study to critically consider settler masculinity through the lens of land, labor, family, and militarism.

I am passionate about community engagement. As director of the UU’s American West Center from 2006-2012, I led the Utah Indian Curriculum Project (UICP), which includes the K-12 textbook We Shall Remain: A Native History of Utah and America and the Utah American Indian Digital Archive (https://utahindians.com). UICP won the WHA’s Autry Public History Prize and several other awards. I have also been involved in numerous oral history projects and government and tribal research partnerships. More recently, I have served as Utah State Scholar for the Smithsonian’s The Way We Work exhibit and as PI for the National Park Service’s "World War II Home Front Theme Study". I train students using all these projects. Perhaps my most significant work over the last seven years has been founding and helping support UU’s Pacific Island Studies Initiative.

I have been attending the WHA conference since 1996 and have served on a variety of WHA committees. I see the Association as one of my primary intellectual homes. If elected to the Council, I would strongly support the WHA’s efforts to continue to diversify our membership. I’m especially keen to see further outreach to scholars in ethnic studies, gender studies, and American studies, and to public historians, including those outside the academy. I would also work to amplify the Association’s anti-racist and anti-sexist work. One of the things I’m proudest of in my career is winning the UU’s Distinguished Teaching Award and Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award. I would be a champion for pedagogical and graduate student initiatives, for instance, using my experience directing UU’s AHA-Mellon Career Diversity Grant and UU’s internship program to improve the WHA’s support of graduate students.

I am Associate Professor and Undergraduate Officer in the history department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Since 2008, I have taught there about the early US, race, slavery, gender, western history, politics, and the Civil War era.

I research and write about race, property, identity, and citizenship claims among free people of African descent in early California. My research focus has become increasingly western over time, and I moved from the Old Northwest to the Pacific. My 2013 book, Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830-1870, was awarded Best History Book at the 2014 Midwest Book Awards and released in paperback in 2015. In 2014 I participated in a NEH Institute on Westward Expansion and the Constitution in the Early Republic, and in 2016 I co-organized a symposium on African Americans in the Nineteenth-Century West at Saint Louis University. My western publications include two 2018 book chapters, “Debating the Place of African Americans in California, 1850-1870,” and “Legal Ambiguities on the Ground: Black Californians’ Land Claims, 1848-1870.” The latter work began in the Clements Center’s 2016-2017 “Laying Down the Law” symposium. I have received several fellowships, including from the Huntington and Clements Libraries and the Bentley Historical Library. A faculty affiliate of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at York University, I also share scholarship in conference papers, public lectures, and media/podcast interviews.

I would be honored to join the WHA council. I have enjoyed getting increasingly involved with the WHA since joining in 2017. I am a regular attendee and participant at the annual meetings, and I have served as a CRAW advisor since 2019. If elected to the WHA council, I would bring a broader North American perspective as a faculty member from a Canadian university. I would value facilitating connections with SHEAR; there are fruitful conversations about race in the Early Republic—among other topics—that are artificially segmented between the two associations. I keep abreast of conversations about equity, sovereignty, inclusion, and diversity, and I participate in them via my faculty union and my department’s EDI committee. I would relish contributing to the WHA’s ongoing work to strategize against escalating governmental and political attacks on academic freedom and history education. The WHA has become a lively forum for telling Black westerners’ stories, and I would value assisting the association in continuing that expansion.

I am a Professor of History and Associate Dean for the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio. My research and teaching focus on borderlands, Mexican Americans, Texas, immigration, race/ethnicity, and the American West. I have taught at a variety of institutions, including teaching-intensive universities, a small liberal arts college, and research 1 universities in California, Iowa, New York, and Texas.

My publications include River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2013), and the co-edited anthologies Major Problems in Latina/o History (Cengage Learning, 2014) and The Latina/o Midwest Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2017). In my second book, “Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship,” I analyze the ways in which memories of the U.S.-Mexico War have shaped Mexican Americans’ civil rights struggles, writing, oral discourse, and public rituals.

I serve on the editorial boards of Studies in Midwestern History, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and the Journal of Texas Archeology and History, and am a series editor of Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest Series for the University of Illinois Press. I am the book review editor for the Journal of American Ethnic History, a member of the Professional Environment Committee for the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and have previously served as vice president and president of the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern History Association.

My university and professional service includes promoting the humanities, increasing diversity in the academy, and providing student mentorship. I have been involved in several public humanities projects on Greater Mexico by engaging university students with public history projects on immigration and borderlands history, and participating in workshops for public school teachers. As a former first-generation university student, I am dedicated to mentoring first-generation and underrepresented college students, and to increasing the diversity of university student and faculty populations.

I began attending the WHA conference as a graduate student, and have been pleased as the membership has become more diverse and welcoming to graduate students. My service on the WHA’s the Local Arrangements Committee (2018 and 2022) and the Program Committee (2020) was very positive. This rewarding service led me to seek election to the WHA Council. I hope to use my professional experience and commitment to diversity and inclusion to help shape the future of the WHA as a member of the Council.