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2025 CONFERENCE: ALBUQUERQUE!

The Western History Association is pleased to announce that the 2025 WHA Conference will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico! Mark your calendars for October 14-17, 2025! The WHA will meet at the Hyatt Regency and Convention Center downtown. 

Rooms will be $149/night and there will be a very small block of rooms for students at $109/night. 

2025 PRESIDENT: WILLIAM BAUER

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 Ph.D. in History at the University of Oklahoma, where he studied with former Western History Association President Albert Hurtado. Before arriving at 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.

2025 CALL FOR PAPERS

65th Annual Conference Call for Papers

October 14-17, 2025

Hyatt Regency and Albuquerque Convention Center

Albuquerque, New Mexico



Roots/Routes: Relationality in Times of Disenchantment


New Mexico is affectionately nicknamed the “Land of Enchantment.” Since time immemorial, it has been home to Pueblo, Diné, and Ndee peoples. Settlers have been coming to its striking landscape–and remaining–since the sixteenth century. Many jokingly refer to it as the “Land of Entrapment”; once you go there, you don’t want to leave. Such characterizations belie deep legacies of layered colonialisms that challenge relationships between kin, communities, and the land and reinscribe alternate logics of being and belonging. These tensions have been born out at various historical moments (1680 Pueblo Revolt, 1837 Río Arriba Rebellion, 1847 Taos Revolt), and more recently at places of public memory and memorialization, even resulting in shootings at statue sites in New Mexico in 2020 and 2023.


With this in mind, and holding our meeting in Albuquerque, we call for proposals that approach the idea of relationality–to lands, kin, peoples, even institutions–in times of disenchantment. Indigenous perspectives on relationality stress reciprocity and responsibility, and we invite proposals from a variety of perspectives that consider the idea of relationality in the history of the American West. How have people and communities in the West conceived of their relationships and responsibilities? What have successful models of relationality, and ruptures in these relationships, meant in the region’s history? Through the lens of western history, how can we renew the theory and practice of relationality? We hope for an enriching conversation, with panels that will help us rethink the historical roots of our relationships in the West, broadly conceived, and imagine useful models for future relationality.


Travel scholarships, support, and prizes for students and public historians are awarded annually by the WHA. Please visit the WHA website (www.westernhistory.org) for more information on membership, awards, sponsors, and future events. The WHA is housed in the History Department at the University of Kansas and benefits from the generous support of the KU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.


Policy: Diversity of Program Participants Statement


1) The Program Committee will actively promote the full and equitable inclusion of racial and ethnic minorities, diverse Indigeneities, religious minorities, people with disabilities, women, LGBTQ+ people, and people with various ranks and career paths on the Annual Meeting program.


2) Although not all sessions can reflect the entire diversity of the profession, the Program Committee will encourage proposers of sessions to include diverse sets of participants, addressing gender diversity, racial and ethnic diversity, sexual diversity, religious diversity, disability-based diversity, and/or LGBTQ+ diversity.


3) The Program Committee will encourage session proposers to consider the benefits of including on their panels historians in various career paths and of various ranks (i.e., senior scholars, public historians, graduate students, independent historians, etc.) within their organizations/institutions.


2025 Program Committee Co-Chairs

Co-Chair, Maurice Crandall, Arizona State University

Co-Chair, Margaret Huettl, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh


2025 WHA President

William Bauer, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

The CFP deadline is December 5, 2024. Guidelines for submitting full sessions (preferred) are available at www.westernhistory.org/2025. The paper and panel submission process will open on September 1, 2024. If you have questions, please contact the 2025 Co-Chairs listed above. You can also contact the WHA office: wha@westernhistory.org


SUBMIT YOUR WORK! (COMING IN SEPTEMBER 2024)


If your work is accepted for the conference program, you must pay a registration fee for the conference. The WHA Policy on Conference Participants requires all conference program participants, regardless of professional status, to register for the conference if your work is accepted.


WHA PARTICIPANT POLICY

2025 PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS



2025 PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBERS


TBD


2025 LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS CO-CHAIRS



2025 LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS COMMITTEE MEMBERS

TBD


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!