2023 Pacific Coast Branch Election
The PCB-AHA Nominations Committee submits the following nominations for the 2023 election. Balloting will begin July 17 and close on July 28, 2023, at 11:59 pm Eastern time. All PCB members received an email with the ballot link, or can find it on historians.org/myaha. AHA members living in the United States west of the Mississippi River or the western provinces of Canada are also PCB members. If you need any assistance, contact ltownsend@historians.org.
President-elect (select one)
Ari Kelman
University of California, Davis
Ari Kelman is Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, where he also serves as faculty advisor to the chancellor and provost. He is the author of Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2015); A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard Univ. Press, 2013), recipient of several national awards and honors, including the Bancroft Prize; and A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Univ. of California Press, 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize. Kelman’s essays and articles have appeared in The Nation, the New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, and many other publications. Kelman has contributed to outreach endeavors aimed at K-12 educators, and to public history projects, including documentary films for the History Channel and PBS’s American Experience series. He has received numerous grants and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Huntington Library; served on a variety of editorial boards, including for the Journal of American History and Oxford University Press, as well as program and prize committees; and held several administrative posts. He is now writing a book titled For Liberty and Empire: How the Civil War Bled into the Indian Wars and editing the journal Reviews in American History.
Council (select two)
Christopher Hodson
Brigham Young University
Christopher Hodson (PhD, Northwestern University, 2004) is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world. An associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, he is the author of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012) and essays in the William and Mary Quarterly, French Historical Studies, Early American Studies, and numerous edited volumes. With Brett Rushforth of the University of Oregon, he has recently completed a book manuscript, also to be published by Oxford, on the intertwined histories of France, West Africa, and the Americas from the medieval period through the age of revolutions. He has received fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society, and has taught as a visiting lecturer at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He has served on numerous editorial boards, conference planning committees, and awards committees, and has recently accepted a position on the College Board’s AP US History Exam Development Committee. He is also a volunteer instructor at the Utah State Prison via the Utah Prison Education Project, and serves as an appointed member of Utah’s Higher Education and Corrections Council.
Kate Flach
California State University, Long Beach
Kate L. Flach is an incoming assistant professor for the Department of History at California State University, Long Beach. She is a 20th-century historian whose research and teaching interests include media, race, and gender. She earned her BA and MA from the University of Akron, and her PhD in history from the University of California, San Diego. Her book manuscript, Producing America: Race, Media, and National Identity, examines how television producers responded to changing broadcast policies in the 1960s and 1970s by creating educational sitcoms and dramas that reflected liberal ideals of multiculturalism. Flach’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post.
José Luis Serrano Nájera
University of New Mexico
José Luis Serrano Nájera is the proud son of immigrant parents from Guerrero and Zacatecas by way of Mexicali, Baja California, México. He grew up on the westside of Long Beach, CA and is part of the first generation of his family to earn a college education in the US. He was a community college transfer student who ended up focusing on Chicana/o/x history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he eventually earned his PhD. Dr. Serrano Nájera’s research foci are national and transnational civil and human rights activism and social movements utilizing archival and oral history research methods. In the past, Dr. Serrano Nájera’s publications have focused on advocacies, social movements, and armed insurrections countering colonial and imperial powers in US and México during the modern era. He is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Confronting Colonial Legacies: Chicana/o Transnational Activism and Indigeneity, 1968 to Present.” Dr. Serrano Nájera is also currently working on research projects that focus on Chicana/o/x educational advocacy, transnational police repression and surveillance of Mexican Peoples’ social movements, transnational labor activism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the impact of oral history on students who partake in Chicana/o/x studies curriculum and pedagogy. In his teaching, Dr. Serrano Nájera emphasizes cultural, political, social, and transnational topical foci, while at the same time working to achieve student learning objectives of understanding diversity, intersectionality, and the development of Chicana/o/x communities across the US.
LL Hodges
California State University, Long Beach
LL Hodges received their PhD in US history from the University of California, Davis, in 2020 after completing a dissertation on the AIDS epidemic in New Orleans. A dedicated teacher, they have taught in many environments, including public and private four-year institutions, high school, and inside San Quentin State Prison through Mt. Tam College (formerly Prison University Project). They are currently helping train California Community College faculty and staff in creating safe zones for LGBTQIA students in addition to creating and teaching the first LGBTQ history courses in colleges around southern California.
Council, Public History (select one)
Robert Franklin
Washington State University, Tri-Cities
Robert Franklin is an assistant professor of history at Washington State University, Tri-Cities, and the assistant director and archivist of the Hanford History Project at WSU Tri-Cities. The Hanford History Project proudly manages the Department of Energy’s Hanford Collection, an archive, artifact, archaeological, and oral history collection focused on the World War II and Cold War history of the Hanford Site. Robert, along with Robert Bauman, has co-authored and co-edited two volumes in the Hanford Histories Series by WSU Press. The first volume of that series, Nowhere to Remember: Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland to 1943 was released in 2018 by WSU Press, and the next volume, Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance: Voices from the Hanford Region, was released in 2020.
Nominating Committee (select one)
Griselda Jarquín Wille
Nevada State College
Griselda Jarquin Wille is an assistant professor of history at Nevada State College. She specializes in modern Latin American focusing on the Cold War, US-Latin American relations and revolution and counterrevolution in Nicaragua. Before joining NSC, she was a Frederick Douglas Teaching Fellow at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Amrit Deol
California State University, Fresno
Amrit Deol is an incoming assistant professor of Asian American studies at California State University, Fresno. Prior to coming to Fresno State, she received her PhD in interdisciplinary humanities from the University of California, Merced. Her current book project, Waves of Revolution: Interrogations of Sikh Political and Spiritual Subjectivities in Punjab and the American West, explores the intellectual history of nonsecular traditions in the Ghadar Party in the early 20th century. More broadly, she is interested in the intersections of race, religion, empire, and anticolonial practices in Punjab and the American West. She has published in Sikh Formations, the Journal of Punjab Studies, and the Ethnic Studies Review and is currently serving on the book review editorial team for Sikh Formations.