Balancing Networks: Reflections on the WHA Graduate Student Prize

Attending the Western History Association conference this year was an exercise in balance. Winning the Graduate Student Prize was deeply gratifying. Still, what stayed with me most was not this much-appreciated recognition—it was the challenge of juggling roles: committee chair, presenter, attendee, and colleague. The WHA has always been a place where scholarship and service overlap, and this year I felt that overlap acutely. I left Albuquerque with a renewed admiration for how this organization sustains the very networks of collaboration and service that enable historical practice and scholarship in the first place.

As Chair of the Public Education and Teaching Committee and a member of the Digital Scholarship Committee, much of my time in Albuquerque was spent in meetings and conversations about how we can better connect Western history to broader audiences. Our committee sponsored a session titled “Teaching Local History in/of the West,” featuring educators from Colorado State University who have been developing hands-on, place-based history programs for K–12 students. Learning about how their students learned about their own community’s history was a vivid reminder that teaching Western history isn’t only about revisiting the past; it’s about grounding the next generation in the complexity of where they stand.

That session set the tone for my week. The Teaching and Public Education Committee meetings were full of energy—new members with creative ideas, veterans sharing lessons learned, and genuine enthusiasm for how history education can adapt to the moment. Balancing those responsibilities with my own desire to attend panels, meet colleagues, and listen to cutting-edge research was difficult. There were moments I felt the tug between wanting to sit in on a discussion of Indigenous mapping projects or nineteenth-century irrigation politics and needing to return to a committee room to review proposals or plan our next initiative. But in that tension, I realized something fundamental: professional service isn’t a distraction from scholarship; it’s one of the ways we make it matter.

As historians, we often talk about networks—the formal and informal relationships that shape movements, communities, and change. At the WHA, I experienced what that actually feels like in real time: a web of conversations, panels, hallway introductions, and late-night debates that give life to an otherwise solitary discipline. I spent part of my week serving and the other part trying to absorb everything the conference offered, from digital scholarship workshops to panels on rural reform. Somewhere between those rooms, I began to see that these connections—between people, methods, and ideas—are the real architecture of the field.

I also presented my own work on a panel titled “Prairie People and Progressive Politics: Entrepreneurs, Money, Political Media, and Revolt on the Great Plains since 1877.” My paper, “Mobilizing the Middle Border,” examined the cooperative politics and entrepreneurial reform networks of agrarian activists in the Midwest during the Gilded Age. The feedback from my co-panelists, chair, and audience was sharp and generous, forcing me to think more critically about how reformers navigated their own contradictions—between profit and community, autonomy and solidarity. In a sense, that same contradiction mirrored my own week: the push and pull between personal intellectual ambition and collective responsibility.

The conference also offered a front-row seat to how a major professional gathering comes together. I was privileged to be invited to join the 2026 Program Committee. Observing how proposals are evaluated and sessions are balanced gave me new respect for the organizational labor that makes what seems effortless from the outside possible. Like the cooperative ventures my research examines, conferences depend on a shared commitment to process—sometimes slow, often imperfect, but ultimately democratic.

Beyond panels and meetings, one recurring topic seemed to animate nearly every hallway conversation: artificial intelligence. The range of views was striking. Some colleagues saw AI as a new pedagogical tool; others viewed it as a threat to critical thinking itself. The debate reminded me that our field has always lived at the intersection of technology and interpretation. The question isn’t whether to resist or embrace change, but how to teach discernment in a moment when both the archive and the classroom are rapidly transforming. This will remain a focus of both the Digital Scholarship and Teaching and Public Education committees.

By the time the conference ended, I felt both exhausted and recharged. Balancing committee obligations with intellectual curiosity had not been easy. I missed panels I wanted to attend, skipped social events I had planned for, and made edits to my talk between meetings. But that balancing act was instructive. It showed me that professional service is not an accessory to academic life; it is a form of practice—a way of learning to think collectively, to collaborate, and to understand the field as a living organism rather than an audience for our individual work.

If anything, my week at the WHA reaffirmed that history is a cooperative enterprise. The same values that shaped the reformers I study—mutual aid, shared labor, and the belief that small, local action can yield significant results—still animate the best of what we do as historians. Watching teachers, students, and scholars find common cause in public education sessions, seeing digital humanists and labor historians swap ideas, or hearing arguments spill over into the hotel lobby long after panels ended—all of it underscored that the WHA is not just a professional association. It is a community that continues to experiment with how to make history public, relevant, and humane.

Winning the Graduate Student Prize was, of course, an honor. But more importantly, it reminded me that recognition is less a culmination than an invitation—to keep showing up, to keep balancing curiosity with service, and to keep contributing to the shared project that is western history. If the people I study built cooperative institutions to navigate an uncertain world, then perhaps our own committees, classrooms, and conferences are their modern analogues: experiments in connection, held together by trust, debate, and the stubborn hope that collaboration still matters.