Liza Black

University of Indiana Bloomington

It would be an honor to serve the WHA. Since 2019, I have served on the Arrell Gibson Prize Committee. As a long-time member who regularly attends and promotes WHA conferences, I remain a steadfast advocate of the organization.

I examine the motivations of territory and the intersections of representation and violence. As a citizen of Cherokee Nation, I developed a lifelong interest in studying Native identity and struggle and detailing the history of Native people’s encounters with violence and exploitation. Recently, I was featured in Perspectives on History discussing the recent surge of Native-centered television representation in Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs. Her work has appeared in more than 20 academic and non-academic outlets. In 2019, I co-edited a special edition of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal with Nick Rosenthal on Native representations of history and culture.

My research -- and interest in reaching a public audience -- has helped my audiences understand how diverse events such as representation, labor, land dispossession, and gendered violence relate to the likelihood of danger and ongoing vanquishment of Native peoples. I employ the disciplines of history, Native American studies, film studies, and gender studies to creatively combine traditional archives, oral history, storytelling, and tribal histories.

I joined the IU Bloomington Departments of History & Native American and Indigenous Studies in 2019 where I will receive tenure in June 2022. I have received fellowships from UCLA, the Ford Foundation, and Cherokee Nation. My current project, How to Get Away with Murder, is a transnational history of missing and murdered Indigenous women. My first book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960, came out in 2020. Currently, I am a Visiting Scholar at UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center.

Michael Lansing

Augsburg University

It’s an honor to be nominated to represent the membership of the WHA on the Council.  I attended my first conference in Lincoln in 1996. The WHA has been my professional and scholarly home ever since.

I am a Professor of History at Augsburg University. My publications include Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics and articles in the Western Historical Quarterly, Environmental History, the Journal of Historical Geography, the Middle West Review, the Utah Historical Quarterly, and Minnesota History.  I have received fellowships from the Newberry Library (2011-2012), Science History Institute (2019), and Minnesota Historical Society (2017). I am working on two books. A Police State: Politics and Public Safety in Minneapolis, 1945-2020 explores the rise of and resistance to police power in that city. Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism is a history of factory-processed grains and the propagation of a political economy that demarcates the way we understand, make, and eat food.

As a public historian, I co-founded the award-winning Historyapolis Project and co-created Purple Places: A Digital History Tour of Prince’s Minneapolis. In 2022, I co-founded the Overpoliced and Underprotected in MSP Project with historian Yohuru Williams at the University of St. Thomas.

My commitments to K-12 history education includes two years on the staff of the National History Day in Minnesota program (1999-2001) and a collaboration with K-5 educators in Minnesota’s largest school district to expand the use of inquiry-based approaches in social studies classrooms (2010-2013). I am also Augsburg’s social studies advisor for secondary education majors (2012-).

I currently serve the WHA as a member of the Autry Public History Committee and I have been a Local Arrangements Committee Co-Chair, a Program Committee member, a Trennert-Iverson Committee member, and a member of the WHQ Board of Editors. I am also a long-time member of the Coalition for Western Women’s History (CWWH), where I served on the Steering Committee, Branded Session Committee, and Irene Ledesma Prize Committee.

In all these spaces, I have benefitted from your ongoing work to transform the WHA. But there is still much to do. Now that we have welcomed colleagues with a wide range of identities and commitments, we must ensure that the WHA meets their needs even as we continue to address longstanding concerns. I also aspire to support the WHA staff, who have successfully guided us through an especially tumultuous time.

Erik Loomis

University of Rhode Island

I am greatly honored to be nominated for WHA Council. I am an environmental and labor historian of the American West. My book Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests is the first book to look at how workers used their unions and other worker organizations to press their own varying environmental agenda in a single industry over a century. I am also the author of A History of America in Ten Strikes and I have a book under contract with the University of Washington Press titled The Making of the Modern Pacific Northwest, 1960-2020.

I am also a long-time union activist and am on the front lines of defending academic freedom. I have published on these issues in The New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, Dissent, Boston Review, and many other publications, as well as daily on my own website Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

I have served WHA in a number of capacities over the two decades since I attended my first WHA in Colorado Springs in 2002. Most notably, I was a Program Committee Co-Chair for the 2021 conference in Portland. In that trying year, I and my fellow co-chairs worked closely with WHA leadership and WHA Council in making the necessary adjustments for a conference that was partially in person and partially online and I am proud to say that we did the best we could given the circumstances of Covid-19.

I have several goals while on WHA Council. First, I would like to build upon the amazing work done by our colleagues in the last fifteen years to diversify the organization and make it such a welcoming home for Latinx and Native scholars by building stronger ties to ASALH and other Black history organizations. Second, I would work to build stronger ties to LAWCHA and other labor history organizations. In both cases, the potential of co-sponsored panels and the creation of stronger ties would strengthen all the relevant organizations. I would also encourage the WHA to stand strong on issues of free speech and academic freedom as our teaching and scholarship have come under attack from those who would prefer we not have discussions of race, gender, homophobia, and misogyny in this country.

Again, I thank my colleagues for considering my nomination to WHA Council.

Mark Johnson

University of Notre Dame

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 recently published book The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky: A History of the Chinese Experience in Montana (University of Nebraska Press) 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.

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.

Lori Lahlum

Minnesota State University, Mankato

I am professor of history and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where I teach courses on the North American West, Minnesota, and family history, in addition to the US survey. Prior to joining the MSU faculty in 2005, I taught at Valley City State University in North Dakota. My research focuses on women and gender in Norwegian America and the northern grasslands. I have co-edited two books—Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains with Molly Rozum (2019) and Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities with Betty Bergland (2011)—as well as authored two book chapters, two journal articles, and a number of short pieces on woman suffrage, rural history, and Norwegian America for online, newspaper, and academic venues. I am (still!) revising a book manuscript tentatively titled “Norwegian Women, Landscape, and Agriculture on the Northern Prairies and Plains, 1850-1920” for Texas Tech University Press; I hope it will be submitted before we gather in San Antonio this fall.

The Western History Association has been my intellectual home since I joined as an MA student in 1990. Between 1993 and 2021, I attended all but four annual meetings. I have had the opportunity to serve on the Nominating Committee (2016-18; chair, 2017-18), the Sara Jackson Award Committee (2008-10; chair, 2009-10), the 2011 Program Committee, and the 2016 Local Arrangements Committee, in addition to co-chairing the 2015 Program Committee.  Additionally, I have been active in the Coalition for Western Women’s History, serving as a member of the Steering Committee, recorder, newsletter editor, member of the Ledesma Prize Committee, and member of the Wednesday Roundtable Committee. Renee Laegreid, Lynne Getz, and I created the Graduate Student Meal Fund on behalf of the CWWH for the WHA. This engagement has helped me understand the organization.

If elected to the Council, I will work to ensure that the WHA is a vital, inclusive, thriving organization that is a safe and welcoming place for all. I support the important work of CARES and CRAW, and I would like to explore additional ways to make the annual meeting more accessible to graduate students, K-12 educators, and contingent faculty. The WHA has been central in my professional life--mentoring, teaching inspiration, professional networks, and friendships—and I would be honored to give back to an organization that has given so much to me.

Katherine Sarah Massoth

University of New Mexico

I am honored to be nominated to serve on the WHA’s Nominating Committee. I began attending the WHA conference in graduate school. Slowly over the last decade, the WHA has become my academic home. I am an Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. I received my Ph.D. and M.A. in History from the University of Iowa.

My interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to research and teaching embraces several themes: gender roles, foodways, domesticity, cultural and ethnic identities, transborder networks, and gendered and raced social structures and legal systems. 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. I also incorporate digital humanities and oral history into my teaching and community engagement.

My book, Keeping House, will be published by UNC Press in Fall 2023. Keeping House 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” to be published in the fall 2020 Journal of Arizona History.

When I first joined the WHA, it took me awhile to find a community but over the years I have seen the WHA make great strides for more diversity and inclusion. I am currently serving positions on both the Coalition for Western Women’s History and the WHA’s Committee on Assault Response and Educational Strategies (CARES). If elected, I would focus my role on the Nominating Committee to furthering the WHA’s council and leaderships work in creating a more representative and inclusive WHA for scholars of diverse backgrounds, employment and communities. I would be honored to serve the WHA community.