Voting begins June 16 and extends until July 30. Watch your email for your personalized link to the ballot or find the link on historians.org/myaha. If you have any questions or need assistance, please contact ltownsend@historians.org.
President-elect
Mary Ann Irwin
California State University, East Bay (lecturer)
I thank the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association for nominating me to serve as PCB-AHA president-elect. 2026 marks my 30th year as adjunct faculty in California colleges and universities, teaching lower- and upper-division courses in US history, women’s history, and the histories of California and the American West. As an educator, I focus on helping students improve their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills, tools they need as members of an information-saturated, as-yet-democratic society. As a scholar, I specialize in the history of California and the San Francisco Bay Area. My short list of publications includes “‘Going About and Doing Good’: The Politics of Benevolence, Welfare, and Gender in San Francisco, 1850–1880,” Pacific Historical Review 68, no. 3 (August 1999), which won the Coalition for Western Women’s History 1999 Jensen-Miller Best Article prize; “‘The Air is Becoming Full of War’: Jewish San Francisco and World War I,” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 3 (August 2005); “Sex, War, and Community Service: The Battle for San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 32, no. 1 (2011), and “‘Women with Hearts’ and the Americanization of Jewish San Francisco, 1850–1880,” Pacific Historical Review 92, no. 4 (November 2023); the latter two articles won the National Coalition of Independent Scholars Eisenstein-DeLacy Award. I co-authored and co-edited Women and Gender in the American West: Jensen-Miller Essays from the Coalition for Western Women’s History (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2004); Women and Politics: California from the Gold Rush to the Great Depression (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2011). I am co-author of The Elusive Eden: A New History of California (Waveland Press), now in its fifth edition. I became editor of the academic quarterly California History, published by the University of California Press, in 2020. I am particularly proud of best-article prizes won by California History authors during my tenure, namely the 2020 Western Association of Women Historians’ Judith Lee Ridge Prize; National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies’ 2024 Antonia I. Castañeda Prize; and, both in 2025, the Western History Association’s Michael P. Malone Award and Arrington-Prucha Prize. My contributions to the profession began in 1997, when I agreed to serve as Chair of the Coalition for Western Women Historians’ Steering Committee, and served through 2007. I was a member of the Western Association of Women Historians executive board from 2003 to 2007. I served in numerous positions in the California Conference of the American Association of University Professors from 2014 through 2020: vice president for community colleges; secretary/treasurer; and acting president. From 2019 to 2022, I was a member of the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Committee on the Status of Women in the Historical Profession; presently I am co-chair (with Thomas Kurtz) of OAH’s Local Resources Committee for its 2027 annual meeting. This is a reprise of my role (with Felicia Angeja Viator) in planning the American Historical Association’s 2024 annual meeting. It was my privilege to serve the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association as its public history representative from 2020–23; presently I am a member of the PCB’s Finance Committee. I previously thought I could receive no greater accolade than the PCB’s 2022 Distinguished Service Award, but this nomination proves me wrong: I am deeply honored by this invitation to serve as PCB president-elect.
Council (vote for 2)
Kate Imy
University of Texas at Austin (associate professor and fellow of the Kerr Chair)
Kate Imy is associate professor and fellow of the Kerr Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army, was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and an IHR-Mellon fellowship in London. It won the NACBS Stansky Prize and Pacific Coast Branch Book Award of the American Historical Association. She earned a Lee Kong Chian Stanford-NUS Fellowship on Southeast Asia to complete second book, Losing Hearts and Minds: Race, War, and Empire in Singapore and Malaya, 1915–1960, which was released by Stanford University Press in 2024. She has hosted multiple conferences, including “Imperial Legacies of 1919,” which explored the complex aftermaths of the First World War, and multiple events related to the history of the body at the IHR in London and Goldsmiths, University of London. She was a co-organizer of the Bodies Beyond Binaries initiative which produced a conference at ETH-Zürich and an edited volume of the same name. Her current book project is tentatively entitled Disabling Divinity: The Women’s Commonwealth of Texas Between the British and American Empires.
Tammy M. Proctor
Utah State University (Distinguished Professor of History)
Tammy M. Proctor is Distinguished Professor of History and former department head at Utah State University. Proctor earned her PhD in history from Rutgers University in 1995 and is a specialist in modern European and gender history with a special emphasis on the history of youth, gender, and conflict. Proctor teaches courses in sport history, both world wars, world history, and the Holocaust, and she is one of the co-founders of USU’s Heravi Peace Institute. Along with colleagues at the university, Proctor co-hosts a radio program on Utah Public Radio entitled Eating the Past. Best known for her books Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (2003) and Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (2010), she is also an expert in the history of international Girl Scouting as well as Boy Scout and Girl Guide history in Britain. Other publications include World War I: A Short History (2017) as well as Gender and the Great War (with Susan Grayzel) and An English Governess in the Great War: The Secret Brussels Diary of Mary Thorp (with Sophie de Schaepdrijver). Her most recent book, Saving Europe: First World War Relief and American Identity (Oxford Univ. Press), appeared in 2025. Proctor has worked at Utah State University since 2013; previously she held the H. Orth Hirt Endowed Chair at Wittenberg University in Ohio. A former Fulbright Scholar in Belgium and an avid runner, hiker, cyclist, and cook, Proctor lives in Providence, Utah.
Blair Woodard
University of Portland (associate professor)
I grew up in Fullerton, California, and attended the University of California, Santa Barbara. After graduating from UCSB, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala. My experiences as a volunteer and wanderings throughout Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean deepened my love for all things Latin American. The region’s diversity, history, and cultural richness became a constant source of fascination. It was this deep appreciation for Latin America that eventually led me to earn my PhD in history at the University of New Mexico. I am currently associate professor of history and director of Latin American Studies at the University of Portland. My broader interests include transnational history, borderlands, US-Latin American relations, and popular culture. My research focuses on the interplay of popular culture and official diplomacy in the creation of US-Latin American relations. I have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, the Society for American Foreign Relations, and the University of Portland. At UP, I teach courses on the histories of colonial and modern Latin America, Cuba, Mexico, environmental history, the US-Mexico borderlands, and Latin American popular culture.
Public History Council Seat (vote for 1)
Bob H. Reinhardt
Boise State University (professor)
Bob H. Reinhardt is a professor in the Department of History and the School of the Environment at Boise State University, where he works in the fields of environmental history, public history, and the history of the American West. Bob is the director of The Atlas of Drowned Towns (drownedtowns.com), a digital public history project exploring the lost histories of communities that were displaced and disappeared by river development projects. Bob’s previous publications include Struggle on the North Santiam: Power and Community on the Margins of the American West (Oregon State Univ. Press, 2020) and The End of a Global Pox: America and the Eradication of Smallpox in the Cold War Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2015). Bob is also the founder and director of Boise State’s Working History Center, which advocates for and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of history. Bob’s professional experience includes serving as the Executive Director of the Willamette Heritage Center (a regional history museum and site in Salem, Oregon), a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University, and teaching positions at Western Oregon University and Willamette University.
Nominating Committee (vote for 1)
Andrew L. Johns
Brigham Young University (professor)
Andrew L. Johns is professor of history at Brigham Young University and the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. He is the author or editor of seven books on US foreign relations and political history, including The Price of Loyalty: Hubert Humphrey’s Vietnam Conflict (2020) and Shaping a Peaceful World: The United States and Post-conflict Diplomacy since 1789 (forthcoming, 2026). A past president of the PCB-AHA in 2018–19, he has held elected office in several professional organizations; serves as the American Historical Association’s representative on the US Department of State’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation; is general editor of the Studies in Conflict, Diplomacy, and Peace book series with the University of Notre Dame Press; and received the Peter L. Hahn Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2025.