Brianna Tafolla Riviere

My name is Brianna and I am running for your GSC chair! If you have been to the WHA before you have probably seen me behind the registration desk as I have volunteered as staff for the last five years. In those five years the WHA has become my academic home and I am dedicated to making it a more welcoming and transparent place for my fellow graduate students. I have also served as the WHA GSC outreach coordinator for the last two years. 

A little more about me. I am a Chicana, first generation grad student, and PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. My dissertation is on the Red Power movement and its connections to Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s. While I am a temporary Californian, I am originally from Ponca, Pawnee, and Omaha lands known currently as Omaha, Nebraska. I got  my B.A. and M.A. at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, where I originally found my love for American West History. 

As your GSC chair, I want to see you all grow as scholars and professionals. My main priority will be to make the WHA a place that is welcoming and productive for graduate students regardless of their academic or career goals. I am looking to create more learning opportunities outside of the conference like online workshops and panels on exams, dissertation writing, career diversity etc. I look forward to serving you all and making the WHA an even better space for us all. 

Gwendolyn Lockman

Gwendolyn Lockman is a fifth year PhD candidate in History at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). She has been a WHA member since 2019, when she first served as graduate student conference staff. Gwen is a historian of labor, leisure, and landscape in the 19th- and 20th-century U.S. West. Her dissertation, “Greening a Copper City: Parks, Mining, and Community in Butte, Montana, 1876-2022,” analyzes the historic tensions between industrial resource extraction and urban development, governance, and citizenship. Gwen earned her MA in History from the UT Austin in 2020, and her BA in American Studies, with minors in History and Government, from Georgetown University in 2016. In 2022-2023, Gwen will be a Junior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

Gwen is committed to diversity, equity, public history, and interdisciplinarity. Gwen is an affiliate of the UT Austin Center for Sports Communication and Media, and was previously a co-coordinator of the UT Gender Symposium, a co-chair of the History Graduate Student Council, and a Women’s and Gender Studies portfolio student. She worked for the Historic Preservation Office and Parks and Recreation Department in her hometown, Missoula, Montana, during Summer 2019 as a curation and interpretation intern at the Moon-Randolph Homestead historic site. Before graduate school, Gwen worked in the legal department for the Washington Nationals and volunteered as a k-8 English-Language Arts and life skills mentor at the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy. The leadership positions she took on as an undergraduate included chapter officer for Phi Alpha Theta History Honors Society, Vice President of the Georgetown Pep Band, Volunteer Coordinator for the Georgetown Native American Student Council, and General Manager for the Georgetown Cabaret pop/rock/funk cover band.

I hope to serve as the 2022-2023 WHAGSC Vice Chair because my membership in the WHA has been one of the best places to make professional and collegial connections during my graduate school career, and I want to help foster similar experiences for others by working with WHAGSC leadership to create an inclusive, enthusiastic, and supportive organization across our field. The WHAGSC has done excellent work in recent years to promote membership diversity through tribal colleges and HBCUS, and to make the annual meeting more accessible through the online pre-conference. I am committed to continuing work on diversity and accessibility, and I will also push for meaningful spaces to discuss organizing, stipends/wages/compensation, problems with contingent employment, and the future of the field, which we, as graduate students, can turn into action within the WHA and at our home institutions. I also want to continue to improve the ways in which we break down barriers between MA and PhD track graduate students, as well as ongoing membership and participation for those scholars who leave academia but nonetheless continue to do meaningful work grounded in historical methods.

Jessica Martinez

I am originally from San Diego, California. I received my BA in History from the University of California, Merced and then proceeded to receive my MA in History at California State University, Stanislaus. Currently, I am a third year PhD student in the Borderlands History Departments at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Here, I study 19th century Chicanas and Mexicanas and their influence on the US-Mexico borderlands. This past year I was the Communications Officer for the Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) Representative and Communications Officer. As a Representative, I was the liaison between the GSA and the History Department ensuring the department was informed of Graduate School opportunities while the GSA was aware of department concerns. Meanwhile, I held the Communications position where I created meeting flyers and posted them on social media. For these reasons, I would like to nominate myself as Membership and Outreach Coordinator.

Taylor Bailey

Taylor Bailey is a doctoral candidate in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying environmental history, the history of science, and the history of the United States. His research centers on the relationship between conservation, sport hunting, and the science and practice of wildlife management in the twentieth-century. His dissertation project examines the history of efforts by federal and state managers to actively restore—rather than simply “protect”—populations of native game animals from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. Prior to attending MIT, Taylor received his M.A. in History from Portland State University, where he also served as the Caroline P. Stoel Editorial Fellow for the Pacific Historical Review.