2026 AHA Election Ballot Information

professor and chair; East Asia, social and cultural history of China since 1600

Website | Curriculum Vitae

Candidate Statement

I am a historian of China whose research focuses mostly on the impact of war and reconstruction on the people and communities of the Yangzi delta region during the Qing dynasty. My teaching covers the full span from Neolithic times to the present. I have witnessed, through my scholarship and teaching, the cooptation of the past to serve political goals, the transformation of ordinary people into national martyrs, and acts of violence committed in the names of the apolitical dead, all of which troubled me. I am inspired by scholarship and writing driven not by the state’s historical narratives but by curiosity, urgent immediate experience, and engagement with a past that is ambivalent, uncomfortable, and beyond easy categorization.

I have served as journal editor, director of graduate studies, program director, and department chair. In each role, I have sought to build spaces of trust, mentorship, and respect, and where possible to reach a broader public. I am committed to the immersive and transformative study of languages, the sustaining of research and teaching across borders, and an expansive vision of intellectual community. My preferred workstyle is collaborative and conversational, but I also stand strong on behalf of my communities.

Our times require us to look beyond the obvious, find inspiration in past resilience, and make intelligible the full complexity and range of human experience. We must come together to defend our values as historians and resist censorship and isolation. The AHA provides an institutional umbrella for these existentially important tasks.

I have benefited in concrete ways from the AHA’s commitment to serve its broad and diverse membership, whether as a new chair, director of graduate studies, adviser of undergraduates, or participant in public history programming. The AHA does vital work on issues including AI, career placement, professional development, and public engagement. It has mobilized against the defunding of the NEH, opposed attacks on public history, and championed the right of teachers at all levels to engage honestly with uncomfortable truths about our national past. For all its efforts, however, the AHA could do more to broaden its geographical and temporal reach. I carry long experience with global content, immersive language training, and international scholarly exchange. I welcome the opportunity to advocate persistently and insistently for the discipline against exceptional institutional, national, and global threats, and to seek solutions to the everyday challenges that face historians today.

Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor in History and director, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities; politics and gender in eastern and southern Africa

Website | Curriculum Vitae

Candidate Statement

Today, historians and the American Historical Association (AHA) face dire threats—threats not only to academic freedom, but to our ability to teach and research the past with honesty, rigor, and the necessary resources. The AHA has worked valiantly to confront many of these threats. It has denounced executive orders that seek to whitewash US history, opposed state laws that mandate teaching false histories and attack tenure, and sued the Trump administration for decimating the National Endowment for the Humanities and defying the Presidential Records Act. In our politically treacherous times, however, the AHA has stumbled in supporting democracy within its own house. The AHA Executive Council has now twice vetoed resolutions approved by members at the annual Business Meeting, barring the full membership from voting on them. Most recently, the Executive Council has blocked, on procedural grounds, membership from voting on a proposed amendment to the AHA constitution, aimed at democratizing the organization, thus preventing the proposal from appearing on this ballot.

If elected president, I would seek to lead the AHA beyond this impasse, working with members and professional staff to democratize procedures, amend the organization's constitution in line with those efforts, and restore trust by directly addressing members' concerns. As a historian of Africa and gender, and former editor of the Journal of African History, I have gravitated towards placing contentious subjects—from reproduction and population control to racialization and globalization—in deep and nuanced historical perspective. I have spent my career at a public university, the University of Washington, where I have chaired the History Department, the School of Drama, and the College Arts & Sciences elected faculty council. From those roles to my current position directing the Simpson Center for the Humanities, I lead by modeling collegiality and generosity but do not shy away from difficult conversations. If elected, I would work to draw historians with divergent views into productive dialogue to move the organization forward.

The AHA is at a critical juncture. Over the past nearly 150 years, it has evolved from being a gentleman's club for historians at elite universities to an organization representing over 10,000 diverse members who share their passion for history with countless students and varied communities. Continuing that evolution requires reforming AHA procedures so that the values and voices of its members can be heard. More than ever, we need a strong and healthy AHA to promote history as a vital intellectual endeavor and indispensable public good.

The Coordinating Group for Democracy in History (the Palestinian Historians Group, Historians for Palestine, Historians for Peace and Democracy) sponsored this petition candidate.

Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History and Africana Studies; Middle East, race and slavery, Nile Valley

Website | Curriculum Vitae

Candidate Statement

I have taught modern Middle Eastern and Africana history for twenty years at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously I taught at the University of Georgia. I authored 2 monographs and many articles and received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and awards from the Institutes for Advanced Study at Princeton and Radcliffe. My historical work centers on the boundaries between Africa and the Middle East and the cultural and political legacies of slavery, particularly the trade in Africans that extended from South Sudan to Istanbul. I am deeply connected to work on the transatlantic slave trade and the terminologies of race across other oceans. I have taught the history of the MENA region, often the Israel/Palestine conflict, and won prizes for those courses.

As president of the Middle East Studies Association—an organization at the front line of freedom of speech struggles—I know how critical a role democracy plays in keeping a learned society healthy, ready for the inevitable challenges that a larger group like the AHA faces constantly. Our role as historians is to witness, chronicle and listen. Democracy and academic freedom die when we choose to ignore any of our individual voices. We have counted on our freedom of speech as historians in the United States, but this luck is proving to be very fragile. We cannot witness the attacks on historians of race, gender or religion and pretend we are not all vulnerable. I want to work against this, as AHA president, to strengthen us as an institution of historians.

I fully support every single one of the primary responsibilities currently written in the AHA’s mission statement. I would wholeheartedly use my presidency to ensure them out of the respect I have for this association with its great national wingspan. In a difficult time for universities, the AHA continues to accomplish so much for historians. I have grown concerned, however, that the AHA has lost sight of the last two of its missions: ensuring freedom of speech and facilitating public engagement. The distance between the Council and members of the AHA on matters regarding the Middle East concern me, not only as a historian of the region, but also as an academic watching humanities departments fall to the wayside, and professors of color losing their jobs. We join this institution in full expectation that our voices will be heard and respected by the institution itself.