Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia

I cut my scholarly teeth on the WHA. My first conference was in 1996, when I was a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, and attendance at the WHA shaped who I have become as a researcher, writer, and community member. Currently, I am professor of history and Killam teaching laureate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where I also serve as associate faculty in UBC’s critical Indigenous Studies program.

My first book was Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Washington, 2007/2017), and with Colleen E. Boyd, I co-edited Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American History and Culture (Nebraska, 2011). My second monograph was Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale, 2016), and my most recent book is Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific (Washington, 2025). I also serve as founding co-editor of UW Press’s Indigenous Confluences book series. My current project is a memoir-history entitled The Train to Weeping Water: An American Inheritance in Six Landscapes, which centers on my great-grandfather, a rider on the so-called “orphan trains,” and the intergenerational legacies of migration, child separation, and settler colonialism.

Although I spent several years away from the WHA when I was circulating in British history spaces, I have returned (very happily) to the community in recent years. I have served on and chaired the Nominations Committee, served on two book prize committees, and have been a member of the Program Committee. My goals as a council member include facilitating the WHA’s ongoing commitments to a diverse and dynamic membership, articulating the importance of the humanities in an increasingly hostile academic landscape, and encouraging the WHA’s relationships with organizations and individuals doing important historical work beyond the academic sphere.

Jeffrey P. Shepherd, The University of Texas at El Paso

It is an honor to be considered for a position on the Nominating Committee. Since first joining the WHA in 1999, I have watched it expand its membership, become more inclusive, and promote the concerns of graduate students. I also enjoyed serving on the program committee and several awards committees over the years.

Since joining UT-El Paso in 2002, I have taught courses in U.S., Indigenous, Borderlands, Western, Environmental, and Public History. I chaired over twenty-five PhD dissertations and MA theses on various topics and eras in borderlands history. My research focuses on Indigenous peoples in North America, particularly the Apache/Nde’ and Native groups in the U.S. – Mexico borderlands; environmental history; and public history. My first book is, We Are an Indian Nation: A History of the Hualapai People, and my second book is, The Guadalupe Mountains National Park: An Environmental History of the Southwest Borderlands. Last fall, the University of Arizona Press published my co-edited book, Gathering Together, We Decide: Archives of Dispossession, Resistance, and Memory in Nde’ Homelands. I am presently writing about Apache treaty-making in the 1850s; and the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site as an example of settler colonial memory making, racial violence, and commemoration. I hold a grant from the National Park Service, and I am consulting on a museum exhibit, both of which focus on Indigenous Peoples in the borderlands. In addition, I am a co-editor (with Myla Vicenti Carpio) of the book series, Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies, through the University of Arizona Press. Between 2011 and 2023, I was Director of our PhD Program and the Chair of our Department.

If elected to the nominating committee, I will further the commitment of the WHA to diversity, graduate student involvement, public history, and its relations with Native peoples and communities in the borderlands.

Elise Boxer, University of South Dakota

Han, Mitakuyapi. Elise Boxer emaciyapi ye. Damakota. Wacina wakpa ed watiye. Oma wapi Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux tribes. Hello, my colleagues! My name is Elise Boxer. I am an associate professor in History/Native American Studies and director of the Institute of American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota. I am an enrolled citizen of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes.

I attended my first WHA conference in 2003 at Fort Worth as a MA student. My mentor, Dr. David Rich Lewis, encouraged me to apply for the Indian Student Conference Scholarship. As a scholarship recipient, I attended the conference where I met Indigenous scholars and scholars of Indigenous history that later became mentors. This was my introduction to the WHA, an intellectual space I have seen grow and transform over the past twenty years.

My scholarship also reflects the different ways I engage the past and community. I published my book in October 2025, Mormon Settler Colonialism: Inventing the Lamanite, with the University of Oklahoma Press as part of the New Directions in Native American Studies series. In 2023, I co-edited From the Skin: Defending Indigenous Nations Using Theory and Praxis which appears in the University of Arizona Press’s Critical Indigenous Studies series. Our contributors are practitioner-theorists whose work are informed by Indigenous knowledge production and knowledge production within academic settings. I also have published various book chapters and articles. My work is meant to be accessible to our profession and the public.

If elected, I will continue to support an intellectual community that welcomes scholars across rank, institution, region, and communities, including Indigenous knowledge and cultural keepers. I am honored and excited for the opportunity to serve on the council as we continue to advocate for inclusive histories of the West. Wopida Tanka. Thank you.

Julian Lim, Johns Hopkins University

It is an honor to be nominated to the WHA Council. I am an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, and my research and teaching focus on immigration, borders and borderlands, law, and race.

I have been active in the WHA ever since my first meeting in 2015. It quickly became my intellectual and professional home – a critical space for not only exciting and deep scholarly engagement but also necessary camaraderie and friendship. Over the years, it has been my privilege to serve in multiple roles for the organization: on two program committees, including as a co-chair for the 2022 meeting; the Bolton-Cutter Award committee; and the Nominating Committee. I am also extremely grateful to have my scholarship recognized by the WHA, with a Ray Allen Billington Prize for the best journal article in Western history not published in the WHQ, as well as the WHA David J. Weber-Clements Center Prize for my first book, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (2017).

If elected to the council, I will support the organization’s commitment to inclusivity and intellectual rigor in the study and teaching of Western history. The ongoing success and growth of the organization depends on embracing an expansive vision of Western history and welcoming a diverse array of researchers and teachers. It also depends on actively supporting its members working on diverse western histories, a large number of whom are public historians and/or teaching in colleges and universities, and who are encountering even more political constraints on speech and attacks on academic freedom. The WHA should remain an essential hub for dynamic scholarly exchange and collaboration. In addition, however, I seek to work with the WHA’s governing body to explore strategies and organizational initiatives that can more effectively support those historians who are bearing the brunt of these ongoing political and ideological attacks.

Matthew Pearce, Oklahoma Historical Society

I am honored to be considered for the Western History Association’s Nominating Committee. Although my career took several twists and turns since attending my first conference as a graduate student in 2007, the WHA remains my intellectual home. I am excited to give back to an organization that has sustained me for almost twenty years.

I hold a PhD and MA from the University of Oklahoma and a bachelor’s degree from Adams State College. I have taught undergraduate courses in U.S. and environmental history, developed online curricula, prepared National Register nominations, and served as National Register Coordinator for the Oklahoma State Historic Preservation Office. I am currently the State Historian for the Oklahoma Historical Society. My work includes coordinating the state historical marker program and managing The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. I also collaborate with historians, state agencies, municipalities, and tribal governments on a range of projects pertaining to Oklahoma and western history. In my limited free time I am working on a book manuscript about the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 that has been on the back burner for far too long. I present regularly at the WHA and have had articles appear in The Chronicles of Oklahoma, Journal of the West, and Utah Historical Quarterly. I currently serve on the Public History and Autry Public History Prize committees.

Once described by E. E. Dale as “not entirely northern, southern, eastern, or western,” Oklahoma continues to have much to offer to the field of western history. I believe my work in public history is an asset to the WHA. In this role, I look forward to helping expand the WHA’s reach in support of the individuals, communities, and institutions who are sharing the history of the North American West.

Cassie Clark, Utah Tech University

I attended my first WHA meeting in Tucson, Arizona, and served as a graduate student volunteer from 2013 to 2017. The WHA felt like my institutional home from my first day working alongside John and Rebecca Heaton at the registration desk. My time volunteering offered me a unique opportunity to meet, learn from, and become friends with many of you. I am honored to be nominated and would love to serve the organization and its members.

As an assistant professor of history at Utah Tech University, I teach a range of courses and collaborate with city partners on public history projects. I have published peer-reviewed and public-facing content that includes an article on Mormonism, eugenics, and whiteness titled “‘No True Religion Without True Science': Science and the Construction of Mormon Whiteness.’” I also contributed a chapter titled “Assessment and Feedback as Instruction in the Online History Classroom” to an edited volume about how to teach history in the online classroom published by Rutgers University Press. I am a public historian with a diverse range of skills, including metadata and digital archiving, historical documentary and podcast writing and production, K-12 curriculum writing, and exhibit design and installation. I am currently writing an environmental history of insane asylums in the Intermountain West.

My background as a first-generation college graduate with no prior knowledge of the nuances of academia has given me insight into how to engage historians of the American West from all walks of life. If you elect me to the Nominating Committee, my goal is to continue to advocate for adjuncts, tenure line and tenured professors, contingent faculty, independent scholars, public historians, teachers, and storytellers from all demographics, economic backgrounds, and identities to feel welcome, seen, and heard by the organization and its members.

Paul Conrad, University of Texas at Arlington

Hi WHA friends and colleagues! I am honored to be considered for a term on the Nominating Committee. I was recruited to present at my first WHA conference in Denver in 2012 to help fill a panel on the pre-19th century West. It’s admittedly something of a cliché for these bios, but my experience at that conference turned the WHA into my academic conference home. The combo of fun, useful feedback, and cutting-edge scholarship drew me in and has kept me coming back. I’ve since served on a program committee and will be serving on another soon. I am committed to involving people in the organization from varied backgrounds, at different career stages, and with diverse research interests. I’m especially interested in recruiting those that may not be the loudest or likeliest to volunteer but nonetheless have useful insights and skills to contribute to the organization.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’ll say a bit more about myself. I’m from Utah originally, which helped spark my interest in understanding how societies have divided “us” from “them” historically. My first academic job was at Colorado State-Pueblo. For the past ten years, I’ve taught at the University of Texas at Arlington. There I completed my first book, The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival, which received awards from the OAH, WHA, and the Historical Society of New Mexico. I’m currently finishing an edited volume on the long history of migration in the West with my colleague Cristina Salinas. I’m also working on a new book project that focuses on the role that Apache (Ndé) survivors of the U.S. boarding school system played within their communities during the first half of the twentieth century.

Thanks for voting and see you at the next conference!

Elyssa Ford, Northwest Missouri State University

My introduction to the WHA began my first year in graduate school at the 2005 Scottsdale conference, and it has been wonderful to see how the organization has evolved since that time. The conferences have become more open to BIPOC and queer histories, public history and digital history work appear regularly on the annual programs, and the concept of “the West” has expanded to include transborder and midwestern studies. Becoming a more inclusive and welcoming space to different kinds of western historians has taken serious work by the organization. The Nominating Committee plays a crucial role in this process of change, and I am honored to be considered as a candidate for this group. My interest in the committee is to ensure that western historians of various backgrounds have a voice within the WHA. As academic jobs change, cultural institutions and federal positions are threatened, and funding for travel shrinks, the organization must assess its role and value. We do this through our leaders, and the Nominating Committee is central to the leadership process.

I am a professor of history at Northwest Missouri State University, and my work centers on gender and sexuality in the West and Midwest, with publications for the National Park Service, Pacific Historical Review, Middle West Review, as well as book projects with Kansas, Washington, and Rutgers university presses. I also am a public historian and have co-chaired the WHA Public History Committee since 2022. This group recently underwent the kind of self-reflection and refocusing that is necessary in today’s academic communities. We decided to transition from fundraising for a conference reception to scholarship development that will allow public historians without institutional support to attend the conference. I look forward to the opportunity to continue this kind of work as part of the Nominating Committee!