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In an effort to better familiarize OAH members with this year’s slate of candidates, we present the abridged versions of their biographical information. The full biographies will be included in the ballot which will be mailed to all members in January.
President-Elect
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History and Director, Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carlina at Chapel Hill. Personal Statement: I treasure the vitality and diversity of the OAH and would be honored to play a role in its evolution. As director of a Southern Oral History Program, I have always valued collaborative scholarship and research strategies that takes me and my students outside the academy. I believe that it is of the utmost importance that we make our work engaging to a broad audience and reassert the critical importance of historical knowledge. I would like to see the OAH intensify its efforts to support public school teachers and revitalize public education, enhance the study of U.S. history abroad, encourage interdisciplinary scholarship, and improve the teaching and research lives of its members. I also believe that we need to maintain an activist professional stance in the larger world.
Executive Board (paired; you will be asked to vote for one person in each pair)
Pair One
Albert L. Hurtado
Paul H. and Doris Eaton Travis Professor of American History, University of Oklahoma. Personal Statement: I welcome the opportunity to serve the OAH. My qualifications include terms on the OAH Nominating Board, the Turner and Binkley-Stephenson Award Committees, and the committee that helped revise the National Park Service Thematic Framework for Historic Sites and Parks. I have also served in elected and appointed capacities in other professional organizations. My experiences as a professor and a public historian have convinced me that it is important to apply historical research to contemporary problems, and I have been particularly involved in finding practical applications for my work in American Indian history. Building bridges between historians and the larger community, as the OAH has done in recent decades, is crucial to the health of the profession. As a member of the Executive Board I will urge the OAH to continue its important work in public outreach, diversity, and teaching at all levels.
Julie Roy Jeffrey
Professor of History, Goucher College. Personal Statement: As a professor in a small liberal arts college, I have become a generalist, teaching a variety of American history courses as well as interdisciplinary classes in special programs. While these experiences have given me a broad perspective on American history and the demands of effective classroom teaching, they have also meant that, like many members of our profession, I have had to struggle to find time for research and writing. If elected, I will strive to continue the outreach to members engaged in balancing scholarship and teaching. Having taught in Denmark, Italy, and England, I also will work to support those who are practicing American history outside of the United States. I strongly support efforts to improve interest in and the teaching of American history in this country, both on national and local levels. Membership on the Executive Council of SHEAR provides experience for this position.
Pair Two
Mary Kelley
Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History, Dartmouth College. Personal Statement: Throughout my career as a historian, my own work in intellectual and in women’s history has benefitted enormously from the imaginative expansion of historical analyses to ethnic and racial groups, social classes, gender and gender relations that previous generations of historians had given short shrift. I have long admired the role that the OAH has played in encouraging these developments, as well as in expanding its organizational umbrella to include historians in community colleges, secondary schools, museums, and historical societies. These aims provided the basic grounding for my efforts when I served on the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award Committee, on the Editorial Board of the Journal of American History, and as Co-Chair of the 1996 annual Program Committee, as well as when I was president of the American Studies Association, and will continue to guide my activities should I be elected to the Executive Board.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Phillips Professor of Early American History and Harvard College Professor, Department of History, Harvard University. Personal Statement: For the last ten years, as a consultant and in my own work, I have been absorbed by visual and material approaches to history—in documentary film, on the web, and in museums. If elected, I would continue to encourage OAH involvement in those areas, with an emphasis on promoting the highest possible standards of scholarship. We need to advocate both for new technologies and for investment in research or the nation’s “history producers” will be delivering thin and dated histories in increasingly sophisticated ways. I am also concerned about declining public support for preservation and archives. As I have pursued my own research in early American history, I have been struck by how much it continues to rely on the efforts of nineteenth-century antiquarians, genealogists, preservationists, and town historians. Although professional historians have done important work in encouraging open access to government documents, we might think harder about how to encourage similar activities in the present.
Pair Three
David M. Kennedy
Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University. Personal Statement: As an active member for more than three decades, I have applauded the evolution of the OAH into a robust organization, promoting the study and teaching of American history. I would welcome the opportunity to contribute whatever I can to the OAH’s further development. I have particular interests in two areas: making sound historical scholarship available to the widest possible audience, through artful writing as well as through video and electronic technologies; and nurturing close professional collaborations between college- and university-based historians and their colleagues in elementary and secondary schools. My own experiences as a teacher, author and editor, consultant to the PBS American Experience series, regular presenter at workshops for high-school history teachers, frequent guest instructor in secondary school classrooms, and chair of the Test Development Committee for the Advanced Placement examination in U.S. History, will help me contribute significantly to the OAH’s undertakings in those areas.
James Patterson
Ford Foundation Professor of History, Brown University. Personal Statement: As an enthusiastic, long-time member of the OAH, I have served on several of its committees (editorial board, program committee, Merrill prize committee), acted as a traveling lecturer, and participated in many of its programs. If elected to the executive board, I would energetically encourage the OAH to continue its excellent work in the promotion of scholarship and teaching of history at the secondary level (where I have taught), at colleges, and in a wide range of public forums, where I hope that the presentation and circulation of fine historical writing and thinking can better inform the American people.
Nominating Board (paired; you will be asked to vote for one person in each pair)
Pair One
Sylvia R. Frey
Professor of History, Tulane University. Personal Statement: Through training and intellectual inclination and by virtue of my tenure at a university situated in New Orleans, a crossroad of cultures, my research and teaching interests have focused on international interconnections. I have taught at several institutions within and without of the United States and have collaborated on research projects and organized conferences that link American and international scholars across traditional disciplinary lines. I would bring the same broad approach to the work of the Nominating Board. I would expand that perspective to encourage the academy to engage more actively in public education.
Peter S. Onuf
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History, University of Virginia. Personal Statement: Trained as a colonial historian, I have taught at a variety of institutions across the country and have been active in the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and other professional organizations. I am particularly proud of my many collaborative efforts with other historians, both as coauthor of articles and books and as editor or coeditor of volumes of scholarly essays. The officers of the OAH should be broadly representative of the group’s membership. The proliferation of more specialist organizations, including SHEAR, represents a critical challenge to the OAH in the next generation. Through its slates, the Nominating Board will play a critical role in shaping the organization’s future.
Pair Two
Dwight T. Pitcaithley
Chief Historian, National Park Service. Personal Statement: As a twenty-year member of the Organization of American Historians, I have participated in its activities with enthusiasm. In addition to presenting papers at its annual gatherings, I have served on its Committee on Public History and twice on its Program Committee and was instrumental in developing a cooperative agreement between the OAH and the National Park Service in 1994. Through this agreement, the OAH and the NPS have cosponsored numerous conferences, conducted research, and reviewed interpretive presentations at NPS historic sites. I believe that the continuing expansion of OAH activities into the realm of public history should continue and that scholars who are willing to engage the public in a discussion on the role of history and historians in a democratic society be encouraged. If elected, I will work to promote for election those members of our organization who strive to balance the thrill of scholarly research with the obligation to share as broadly as possible the insights gained through that research.
James B. Gardner
Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Personal Statement: Having spent most of my career working in professional associations (the AHA and the American Association for State and Local History), I know first-hand the central role played by a nominating committee in the life of an organization and am honored to be a candidate for this position. In putting together slates of candidates, the Nominating Board makes the first critical choices in determining the OAH’s future leadership. As a member of the board, my goal would be to continue its efforts to provide the organization with the strong and able direction it needs. I would use the networks that I have developed over the course of a rather unique career spanning the academic and public history communities, recruiting candidates who reflect the diverse backgrounds and viewpoints that distinguish our discipline today. As a specialist in American history, I know how important this is—no one speaks for us as the OAH does, and its future is critical to the work we share.
Pair Three
Merline Pitre
Interim Dean of College of Liberal Arts, and Professor of History, Texas Southern University. Personal Statement: Historians come from a variety of groups and the number of historians has grown significantly since the 1960s with the trend expected to continue in the future. The OAH has played an important role in accommodating and obliging this diversity. With publications and specialization in the field of African American history, I believe that my presence on the nominating board can only add to this diversity. I would like to help the OAH shape the future of the profession by strengthening its link not only to smaller state, regional and thematic historical associations, but also to historically black colleges and universities.
Carlton E. Wilson
Associate Professor, Department of History, North Carolina Central University. Personal Statement: As an Associate Professor of Modern European History at North Carolina Central University, my speciality area is Modern Britain and my research interests are centered around the Black presence in Britain. I am also the director of the University’s Undergraduate Core Curriculum. I am active in several national and international organizations. I am a member of the American Historical Association’s Committee on Minority Historians. As a member of this Committee I have become active in promoting an increase in the number of minority students in graduate history programs. My participation on this Committee and in other organizations exemplifies my dedication and commitment to service within the historical profession. If elected as a member of the OAH Nominating Board one of my goals would be to ensure that various nominees represent the interests or views of the OAH’s diverse membership. Also, nominees should possess the foresight to move the organization forward in promoting the study of history at all professional levels.
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