I am honored to be considered for a position on the WHA Council. Since my first time attending the WHA in Denver 2012, I knew I had found an intellectually stimulating and welcoming home conference. At the time, I was a high school History teacher and I wondered how I would be received at an academically-oriented conference. The warmth, collegiality, and interest from WHA members signaled that this was an accepting place. I hope to continue this welcoming, supportive environment if selected for the Council position.

Currently, I train K-12 teachers through the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education. I work to expand opportunities for teachers to experience the WHA and to become contributing members through lesson plan development, partnership with scholars of Western History, and creative collaborations to extend new scholarship into classrooms across the region. The initiatives of the Committee on Teaching and Public Education have increased the role of K-12 educators in our organization, a trend I am proud to have been part of implementing and hope to continue.

My scholarly focus is on the history of Chinese communities in the American West, specifically my home state of Montana. I have worked to increase representation of Asian and Asian American history at the WHA by organizing and participating in numerous panels on this theme. My book The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) highlights the experiences of Chinese Montanans in their own words, possible through a transnational, intergenerational translation project that gives access to several large collections of documents translated into English for the first time. The book grew over years of presentations and feedback at WHA conferences and encouragement from scholars in the organization.

In giving back to the WHA, I have served on the Membership and Strategic Planning Committees, chaired the recently-created Disability Studies and Disabled Scholar Award, and have been a member of, co-chair, or chair of the Committee on Teaching and Public Education for the past decade. Most recently, I served on the WHA Program Committee for the 2024 annual conference.

If selected for the Council, I hope to continue partnerships with K-12 educators and public history institutions, to continue to diversify offerings at the annual conference, and to follow in the footsteps of the strong leadership that has made the WHA such a welcoming and intellectually stimulating academic home for us all.

I am an assistant professor of History and Latino/a Studies at Penn State University. In the broadest terms, my scholarship examines how the environment mediates human relationships as we fight over resources, often dictating how social hierarchies change over time. If elected to council, I am most interested in continuing the work of those who came before me to make this organization as welcoming and inclusive as possible. The WHA has been my academic home for more than a decade. Since joining this vibrant community, I have served in various capacities. As a member, I have been on several scholarly panels as well as those that have addressed the issues of the day, such as sexual misconduct, race and racism, and other important topics that we must tackle both in the WHA as well as the larger profession.

I have also organized non-traditional panels that interweave community and family with the academy—like those at our most recent San Antonio meetings which offered the hands-on experience of cooking tamales and making tortillas. As a member of the nominating committee, I worked with my colleagues to bring strong candidates to our slate for election—which is always easy to do in this organization. As longtime member and Chair of the Committee on Race and the American West (CRAW), I have been involved in some more grassroots efforts to diversify the WHA.  These include, but are not limited to, making space where folks can come together to work through some difficult conversations and creating the CRAW/CWWH reception where people can meet and spend time together more informally. Should I be fortunate enough to serve on council, I would utilize my accrued institutional knowledge from serving the WHA in these capacities to make the best decisions possible for the future of our organization.

I attended my first WHA conference in 1990 and have since considered it my home organization.  Over that span, I’ve seen it grow ever more welcoming to a wider variety of people.  It must continue to be so, which is why I am running for council.

My teaching and research have benefited from and reflected the transformation of the WHA.  As a professor of history at Colorado State University, I have taught seven different courses related to the US West.  I also teach the history of Mexico.  I center DEI concerns, especially in courses on the history of justice, historical trauma, and race and recreation in the national parks.  Inspired by one of my graduate students, I now include disability history in all my courses.  My research has explored Los Angeles flood ecology, masculinity and nationalism in the early republic West, national parks in global perspective, and, in my most recent book, the deep history shaping current relations between indigenous people and a borderlands national monument.  Increasingly my deepest commitments are to public history, deploying it to build bridges across polarized communities and amplifying the voices of people whose stories are too often under told.  As director the CSU’s Public and Environmental History Center and as the State Historian of Colorado, I have pursued this agenda with colleagues, students, public servants, indigenous people, non-profit leaders, K-12 educators, and citizen historians.  I learned to do these things through my participation in the WHA and want to give it back by joining the council.

Serving you on the council would continue my commitment to the organization.  I have served on the WHA program committee, local arrangement committee, and WHQ editorial board.  I have sat on and chaired both the Rothman and Malone prize committees.  My center is an annual sponsor of the WHA conference.  The WHA is a strong and nurturing organization, but not one whose work is finished.  My vision as a council member would be to help it maintain financial and administrative stability while ensuring that the benefits I have gained as a member of a diverse, welcoming organization accrue to future generations of all kinds of WHA members.

I am honored to be nominated to serve on the WHA Council. As an Associate Professor of History, Chair of the History Department, and Director of Women’s & Gender Studies at Bradley University. My focus in these roles has been on nurturing critical thinking, fostering interdisciplinary research and writing, promoting community-engaged learning and advocacy, and instilling knowledge of diversity, equity, and inclusion best practices in our undergraduate curricula. My administrative accomplishments include the development and implementation of innovative, interdisciplinary curricula, including the creation of concentrations in Digital Humanities and Public History and Difference, Identity, and Power, as well as leadership on many initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion.

My scholarly interests span a range of topics within Western history, focusing predominantly on cities and social movements. I am also committed to interdisciplinary research that allows for more nuanced understanding of the experiences of women, gender-expansive, and LGBTQ people. I am the co-editor of the anthology City Dreams, Country Schemes: Community and Identity in the American West (2011) and the Urban West Series editor for the University of Nevada Press. I recently published, “Give Me a Nation of Great Mothers”: Alice Robertson’s Conservative Maternalism,” in This Land Is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s, ed. Loughlin & Janda (OU Press), an article that examines the political career and public life of Alice M. Robertson, Oklahoma’s first and the nation’s second Congresswoman. My latest project, Building the Queer Body Politic: The History of the Gay Games & the Making of Transnational Queer Cosmopolitanism, is an interdisciplinary study located at the intersections of LGBTQ and social movements history, transnational urban history, gender, sexuality, and queer studies.

In addition to my professorial role at Bradley, I am committed to advancing the scholarship and pedagogy of U.S. History and Gender and Sexuality Studies through community-engaged learning that is accessible to the public. I have actively engaged in fundraising, grant writing, and community outreach to support these goals. I am the founder of two lecture series at Bradley – the “Gender Scholars Lecture Series" and "Activism Plays in Peoria Lecture Series" – and I have collaborated with colleagues to sponsor 150 events that students and the public to explore the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and culture. Using my expertise in intergroup dialogue facilitation, salary negotiation, and LGBTQIA+ inclusion, I lead a team that organizes impactful trainings for students, faculty, and staff. Our WGS faculty team has successfully trained more than 1400 students in salary negotiation skills, and WGS interns who run our LGBTQIA+ inclusion workshops have trained more than 1,000 of their peers. For my dedication to advancing diversity, inclusion, and equity as well as my commitment to interdepartmental collaboration, my college and university have recognized me with several awards including: Excellence in Advancing Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (2023); the Student Engagement Excellence Award (2023); the Notable Publication Award (2019, and Bradley University’s award for Excellence in Interdepartmental Collaboration (2017).

I am a 25-year member of the WHA, a founding member of the WHA’s QuIT Caucus, and a member of the Coalition of Western Women’s History. I am proud to have presented on the CARES Committee’s inaugural session on Title IX and gender equality in higher ed. To the WHA Council, I will bring experience as an interdisciplinary scholar, administrator, and advocate for inclusion. I believe that intergroup dialogue facilitation and generative listening techniques are tools that can serve us well as we seek to amplify diverse voices and promote an authentic culture of inclusion and belonging in the WHA. I am also committed to exploring ways in which the WHA might continue to welcome interdisciplinary scholars, public history professionals, and digital humanities practitioners into the organization. Finally, I would like to see the WHA leadership consider how the organization can provide members with advocacy and organizing resources during a time when the humanities are under attack in higher education. My goal will be to serve collaboratively, building on the work of WHA leaders and members to make our organization an incredibly welcoming, vibrant, accessible, and inclusive for scholars of all social identities, so that together we can fulfill our mission of advancing the study and understanding of Western history. 

I am deeply honored to stand for a seat on the nominating committee in an organization of which I have been a part for twenty years. The Sara Louise Welch Chair and the L.R. Brammer, Jr. Presidential Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, I specialize in histories of gender, sexuality, conservative politics, and the American West. I am the author of an award-winning book, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (2020), which chronicles the intimate and everyday activism of the western social conservatives at the end of the twentieth century. My current book project, titled Straightening Out: A History of Anti-Queer Politics in Rural America, tells the story of the anti-LBGTQ+ movement in the American West. It explains how rural places, not suburban ones, became the bedrocks of social conservatism in America.

I have a front-row view of the many crises facing our profession at this moment. Since Roe v. Wade fell in 2022, I have been thrust into public-facing historical work and had to wrestle with what it meant to produce useable pasts for our current, politically-polarized, moment. I work, too, in one of several states attempting to censor scholars and excise histories of race and sexuality in K-12 and college classrooms. As a mentor to many graduate students at OU, I have become increasingly angry at the cratering job market that cannot do right by their excellent work. The WHA has a strong, diverse membership and a tradition of ethical leadership at all levels. I am committed to extending that tradition, promoting leaders who are willing to take up the most serious challenges facing our profession.

I am thrilled to be nominated to serve on the WHA’s Nominating Committee. I have been a member of the WHA since the 2010 conference in Lake Tahoe. Since then, the WHA has become my academic home, and I have become actively involved in the organization. I currently serve in various subcommittees of the Coalition for Western Women’s History and the WHA’s Committee on Assault Response and Educational Strategies (CARES). I am also on the 2025 Local Arrangements Committee for the WHA.

My experience growing from a graduate student to an assistant professor while a WHA member has allowed me to gain insights into the WHA’s long-term goals and intellectual commitments from many perspectives. As a member of the Nominating Committee, I would be eager to further the work of the WHA’s council and leadership in promoting a more equitable and inclusive academic space for scholars of diverse backgrounds and career paths. As the Nominating Committee has the formative role of nominating both the President and the President-Elect who steer the future of the Western History Association, in this position, I would push for increasing the participation of scholars of color and ethnic minorities as well as Indigenous people, LGBTQ+ people and people with various disabilities and capabilities.

Currently, I am an Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico and I am also the section head for the Department of History’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Section. My work in the U.S. West focuses on rethinking the definition of the West in North American History and centers questions of race, gender, and ethnicity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands from the Spanish Colonial Era through the nineteenth century. My book, Keeping House, will be published by UNC Press and analyzes the transition from Mexican control to U.S. control in Arizona and New Mexico by centering the home and women’s responses within the home to this larger political shift. My most recent publication is “Engendering the Long Nineteenth Century and Mapping Gender on Arizona History” in the Journal of Arizona History.