YGSNA Members Win Multiple Prizes at the Western History Association

November 6, 2015

At the 55th annual Western History Association (WHA) conference, current and former YGSNA members actively participated in conference sessions, shared new publications, and won three different association prizes. With over seven hundred scholars, public historians, students, publishers, National Park Service employees, and others interested in the study of the American West, this year’s WHA meetings explored the conference theme of “Thresholds, Walls, and Bridges,” specifically encouraging assessments of how a “new generation of new western historians has opened windows in the walls that separated histories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation.”

History doctoral candidate Tiffany Hale participated in a conference panel on “Worldviews and Ideologies of the Pacific Rim: An International Multiracial Western History” and also received the WHA’s American Indian Student Conference Scholarship, an annual competition that funds Native student participants to attend the association meetings. American Studies and African American Studies Doctoral Candidate Khalil Johnson received the Arrell M. Gibson Award, a biennial award presented for the best essay of the year on the history of Native Americans for “The Chinle Dog Shoots: Federal Governance and Grass-roots Politics in Postwar Navajo Country,” in the Pacific Historical Review. Former YGSNA member and 2010-2011 Henry Roe Cloud Fellow Boyd Cothran (Assistant Professor of U.S. History at York University) won the Robert M. Utley Book Award for his 2014 book, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence. This prize is given annually by the WHA to the “best book published on the military history of the frontier and Western North America (including Mexico and Canada).” All three (photographed here with former YGSNA postdoctoral fellow Josh Reid) were invited to the annual awards banquet to receive recognition for their achievements.

Congratulations to all three and to other Yale graduate students, alumni, faculty, and staff for participating in this year’s annual meeting.