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WHA 2023 ELECTION

Article VI of the WHA Constitution and Bylaws explains the function and process of the Nominating Committee for the organization's annual election. This year's Nominating Committee (Katrina Phillips, Miroslava Chávez-García, Rebecca Wingo, Karl Jacoby, and Maritza De La Trinidad) arranged the slate and Council approved it. 


Electronic ballots will be sent to all active members via email from OpaVote on July 1, 2023. If you do not receive an email on July 1, or prefer a paper ballot, please contact the WHA office. This is a great time to make sure your membership is up to date or to join the WHA as a new member! Voting is open through October 13, 2023.


Your vote matters! Thanks for your interest in selecting the future leaders of the WHA! 

NOTICE OF MEMBERSHIP RATE CHANGES

Dear WHA Members:


The last time the WHA membership voted to update its membership categories and fee structure was in 2018. The organization worked hard to keep the membership rates flat for five years, even throughout the uncertainties and challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. At its spring 2023 meeting, the WHA Council voted to increase a few membership categories. The proposed changes are highlighted below. Rates without highlights will not be changed.


WHA membership fees provide programming, events, and conferences with specific aims to make these accessible and beneficial to as many individuals in the history profession as possible. If you have specific questions or concerns about this change in membership, please do not hesitate to contact the office.


The WHA Council can propose changes, but these changes will not go into effect without a majority vote from the membership at the annual WHA Business Meeting. (From the WHA Constitution: Bylaws: 1. Membership: “Council, with concurrence of a majority vote at an annual conference, shall determine dues for each category of membership.”)


The WHA office is responsible for communicating these proposed changes to the membership. A vote on this proposal will take place at the WHA’s 2023 Business Meeting on Friday, October 27, at the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles. Please consult the WHA 2023 Conference Program for the specific time and location.


WHA PRESIDENT-ELECT

William Bauer

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“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.”

William Bauer is an enrolled citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes and professor of American Indian history and program director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies minor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He grew up on northern California’s Round Valley Reservation and earned his undergraduate degree in American Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame. Bauer received his PhD in History at the University of Oklahoma, where he studied with former Western History Association President Albert Hurtado. Before coming to UNLV, Bauer taught at the University of Wyoming. He has offered classes on American Indian history, the history of the American Southwest, the history of Indian gaming, sports history and museums. Bauer has held postdoctoral and visiting scholar appointments at Stanford University, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Los Angeles.

Bauer has been an active member of the WHA since receiving an Indian Student Scholarship and the Sara Jackson Award at the 1999 WHA meeting in Portland. He has served on the WHA Nominating Committee and Council as well as two Program Committees and the Robert Athearn, Donald Fixico and Arrell Gibson award committees. He has also served on the council of the American Society of Ethnohistory and has been a member of the American Historical Association’s Committee on Minority Historians and the Organization of American Historian’s African American, Latino, Asian American and Native American (ALANA) Historians and Histories committee.

Bauer’s research examines the history of Indigenous People, labor and oral history in California and the American West. He is the author of the John C. Ewers award winning We Are the Land: A Native History of California, co-written with Damon Akins (University of California Press, 2021), California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (University of Washington Press, 2016) and “We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here”: Work, Community and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). In addition to working on oral history projects with the Round Valley Indian community, Bauer has worked for the Tolowa Nation of northwestern California.

COUNCIL POSITION A

On your ballot you will vote for one person to fill each position.

Douglas C. Sackman

University of Puget Sound


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.


Matt Basso

University of Utah

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.


COUNCIL POSITION B

On your ballot you will vote for one person to fill each position.

Dana Elizabeth Weiner

Wilfrid Laurier University


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.


Omar Valerio-Jiménez

University of Texas at San Antonio


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.


NOMINATING COMMITTEE POSITION A

On your ballot you will vote for one person to fill each position.

Lindsey Passenger Wieck

St. Mary's University


Lindsey Wieck is an Associate Professor of History and director of the M.A. in Public History at St. Mary’s University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in May 2016 and an M.A. from Northern Arizona University in 2010. While doing her research, Wieck grew excited by the possibilities to integrate GIS, text analysis, and data visualizations into her work on Latino community formation and gentrification in the Mission District of San Francisco. She also specializes in the history of the American West, race and ethnicity, and American cities. She enjoys incorporating digital technologies in her teaching and also emphasizes digital writing and communication in her courses.

The WHA has long provided a home for both my scholarship and my personal and professional development. After my first time at the WHA in 2008 as an M.A. student, I joined the Committee on Teaching and Public Education, and since then, I've been involved in the organization in a variety of ways, including serving on the Digital History Committee, CWWH, and on Program and Local Arrangements committees for the 2018 and 2022 conferences. Throughout this work, I've advocated for inclusion of non-traditional members (teachers, community members, public historians, etc.) in the organization and its programming. If elected to the Nominating Committee, I would continue this work to further the inclusion of marginalized groups and non-traditional members in the WHA.


John Mckiernan-Gonzalez

Texas State University


Even before I decided to apply for graduate training, I had been part of a community of people interested in and shaped by the history of immigration, environmental injustice, LGBTQIA cultures, labor organizing, civil rights, and immigrant rights. My graduate work in Ann Arbor confirmed the importance of the American West to these matters. My work in public health followed these lines. Since my time at the National Museum of American History and the National Archives, I have become more aware of my indebtedness to the people in as well as marginalized by the institutions that maintain records, archives, histories, and our public memory. Since graduating, I have collaborated with a variety of departments and organizations to bring disability histories, labor histories and community histories into local, state and national conversations.

I direct the Center for the Study of the Southwest at Texas State University, where I am also an Associate Professor of History.  My first book, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848-1942 (Duke, 2012), treats the making of a U.S. medical border in the Mexico-Texas borderlands. I co-edited Precarious Prescriptions: Contested Histories of Race and Health in North America (University of Minnesota, 2013) which examines the contradictions and complexities tying medical history and communities of color together. My takes on Latina/o/xs and medicine can be found in American Latinos in the Making of the United States, Keywords in Latina/o Studies (NYU, 2017) and other venues. My next project, Working Conditions: Medical Authority and Latino Civil Rights tracks the changing place of medicine in Latina/o/x struggles for equality. Born in Queens, I grew up in Colombia, Mexico, New Mexico and the South and bring these experiences to projects in public history, medical history, and Latine studies.

Given the national revival of a push to make transnational, community-based, gender inclusive, ethnically diverse, environmentally aware, and/or class inflected historical processes and historical scholarship unthinkable, unteachable and taboo, I understand the Western History Association in its most inclusive to be a key partner in defending and expanding the many meanings of history, research, training, teaching and public engagement to make them sustainable and accessible.  The work of the WHA can be vital to defending history and historical work in all its forms, and I understand my participation in the nominating committee to be a contribution to this end. I thank you for your consideration.


NOMINATING COMMITTEE POSITION B

On your ballot you will vote for one person to fill each position.

Tiffany Jasmin González

University of Kansas

I would be delighted to serve on the Nominating Committee for the WHA. If voted as a committee member, I will hold values such as diversity, inclusion, vision, and collaborative communication at the forefront to advance the organization's mission. In addition, I will ensure to nominate officials with the association’s best interest in mind and who will advocate for policies and agenda items to benefit all members.

In 2015, I attended my first WHA conference in Portland, Oregon, as a first-year Ph.D. student. At that conference, I met historians who are doyens in their field, made new friends, and felt embraced as a budding Chicana historian in the fields of Mexican American and Latina/o/x history. Since my first WHA conference, I have served the organization in various capacities. I was a member of the WHA Graduate Student Caucus Council for three years and then chaired the graduate caucus for two years before I earned my Ph.D. I also served as the graduate representative for the Coalition for Western Women's History. In both the WHA and CWWH, I promoted racial diversity, the importance of mentoring, paved the way to recruit new graduate members from various institutions, organized graduate professional panels, delegated fundraising tasks, and advocated for graduate students in WHA Council meetings. I understand how valuable it is to have committed leadership and a council of diligent colleagues who will take the appropriate measures to answer any member input, find solutions to issues that might arise, and maintain a welcoming environment. My past experience with serving the profession will make a valuable contribution, and that is why I am seeking your vote on the Nominating Committee for the WHA.

I am currently an Assistant Professor of Latina/o/x history at James Madison University, but in Fall 2023, I will be at the University of Kansas. My book manuscript-in-progress, Representation of Change: How Chicanas Reshaped the American Political Process, is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press under the Latinx Histories Series. My work focuses on Chicana contributions to the Raza Unida Party and the National Women's Political Caucus during the Chicano Movement and the Women's Movement of the late twentieth century. I currently serve on boards and committees for the CWWH, OAH, OHA, TSHA, and CCWH. I greatly attribute my academic trajectory to mentors who have championed and helped me navigate graduate school and now the academic profession, especially since I grew up working-class, and was the first woman in my family to earn advanced degrees.

Douglas K. Miller

Oklahoma State University


My research explores Native American urbanity, mobility, and work. My first book, Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century (UNC Press, 2019), discusses how and why Native peoples moved to major cities for work, social, and education opportunities throughout the twentieth century. I have two new book projects contracted with Liveright/Norton. “Washita Love Child: The Life and Times of Jesse Ed Davis” is a comprehensive biography of the unheralded Kiowa/Comanche musician who played with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, John Lennon, and John Trudell, among many others, in an extraordinary life and career. The second, “Indigenous Incarceration: Native Prisoners from Colonial Wars to Carceral States,” considers Native American incarceration, recidivism, and prison activism from the colonial period to the present. My work has also appeared in journals and edited volumes, including Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance (UNC Press, 2019) and Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization (OU Press, 2022). At Oklahoma State, I have won teaching, research, and service awards, mentor numerous graduate students, and teach courses on Native American history, United States history, and history through music. Prior to joining OSU, I served a postdoctoral research fellowship at Southern Methodist University's Clements Center for Southwest Studies.

I have conferenced with the Western History Association for many years, as a panel presenter and organizer. I am currently serving as chair and finishing my three-year term for the WHA’s Donald L. Fixico Book Prize Committee. I now welcome an opportunity to serve the WHA Nominating Committee, which would allow me to contribute to our organization in a new capacity, while gaining valuable new experience and putting my current scholarly and professional experience to greater use.

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Western History Association

University of Kansas | History Department

1445 Jayhawk Blvd. | 3650 Wescoe Hall

Lawrence, KS 66045 | 785-864-0860

wha@westernhistory.org 


The WHA is located in the Department of History at the University of Kansas. The WHA is grateful to KU's History Department and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for their generous support!