Voting begins June 17 and extends until July 31. 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
James Gregory
University of Washington (professor and associate chair)
James N. Gregory is a professor of history at the University of Washington and former Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies and former president of the Labor and Working-Class Studies Association (LAWCHA). He is author or editor of four books and many articles. His first book received two prizes from PCB-AHA. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (1989) won the W. Turrentine Jackson prize as a dissertation followed by the Annual Book Award from the Pacific Coast Branch (also the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the OAH). Another book, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (2005) won the Philip Taft Labor History Book Prize. Recent publications focus on social movements and the political geography of American radicalism including the centennial edition of The Seattle General Strike (2019), authored by Robert L. Friedheim with an introduction, photo essay, and afterword by James N. Gregory.
Other recent work involves digital public history. The Civil Rights & Labor History Consortium brings together 14 online projects with more than 1,200 separate pages—featuring articles, video oral histories, maps, and thousands of photos and documents. The Consortium has been widely used by scholars, news media, and in classrooms at many levels. It has recorded more than 15 million page views and includes the award-winning Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project, the Mapping American Social Movements Project, and the America’s Great Migrations Project. The newest enterprise is the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project, which has documented more than 50,000 properties in hundreds of neighborhoods in Washington State that were legally restricted on the basis of race and sometimes religion. The research helped inspire a pioneering new reparations law that soon will provide compensation to victims of racist housing discrimination in Washington state.
Dr. Gregory has been committed to the Pacific Coast Branch for more than 30 years, serving previously on the PCB Council, co-chair of the Program Committee, and most recently on the Editorial Board of the Pacific Historical Review. He has held other positions with the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association, and the Labor and Working-Class History Association where he served a two-year term as president.
Council (vote for two)
Steven C. Beda
University of Oregon (associate professor)
Steven C. Beda is associate professor of history at the University of Oregon. He researches and teaches about Pacific Northwest history, labor history, and environmental history. He is author of Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country (University of Illinois Press, 2023). When not in the classroom or the archives, he can most likely be found fishing one of Oregon’s rivers or hiking one of its trails.
Lawrence Culver
Utah State University (associate professor)
Lawrence Culver is an associate professor in the Department of History at Utah State University. He received his PhD at UCLA, and his doctoral dissertation received the Rachel Carson Prize for best dissertation from the American Society for Environmental History. His first book was The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America (Oxford University Press). He has also published articles and essays, including “Seeing Climate through Culture” in Environmental History and “Confluences of Nature and Culture: Cities in Environmental History” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History. His current book project, “Manifest Disaster: Climate and the Making of America,” explores the role of climate and debates about climate in the history of the U.S. and North America. He has received multiple fellowships from institutions including the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the University of Munich. He also has experience in public history, with institutions including the Autry Museum of the American West and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
His professional service duties include serving on prize committees for best dissertation and best book for the American Society for Environmental History, best article for the Urban History Association, and the Merle Curti Social History Book Award Committee for the Organization of American Historians. He has chaired the American Society for Environmental History’s Annual Conference Program Committee, and also currently serves on the editorial board for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His professional service for the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch includes three years on the Annual Conference Program Committee, and service on the W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award Committee and the Norris and Carol Hundley Book Award Committee.
Mustafah Dhada
California State University, Bakersfield
Mustafah Dhada was born and brought up in Mozambique, studied comparative theology, Islamic jurisprudence, formal logic, Hadith, Sufi doctrine and practice, and comparative mysticism, before heading to England for higher education. He graduated from Sussex in 1977 and did his doctorate at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. Dhada served ten years in academic administration as Dean of Arts and Sciences, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies, Dean of Extended Education, and Associate Vice President for Academic Programs, while serving as a tenured professor of African and Middle Eastern history.
Dhada is a prolific scholar, having penned four monographs, six book chapters, seventeen juried articles, eighteen book and film reviews, four non-juried articles and texts, fifty-two juried papers and presentations, ten special academic reports on strategic planning, student enrollment and retention, curriculum design, and endowment funding. His book The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu In Colonial Mozambique, 1960-2013, (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017), won the American History Association’s Martin A. Klein Award for the most distinguished scholarly text in African history in 2017. The text placed “the grisly massacre in historical context … expand(ing) historical knowledge and perfect(ing) methods to produce a definitive social history of Wiriyamu.” He is also a recent winner of the Best Research and Creativity Scholar at CSUB 2020–21.
Dhada’s first monograph Warriors at Work was reviewed as a landmark study in the field of Luso-African revolutionary warfare, “a vigorously revisionist work grounded in archival sources.”
Diane Johnson
California State University, San Bernardino (associate professor)
Diane Johnson is associate professor of history and ethnic studies at California State University, San Bernardino and the current chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies. She received her MA and PhD from the University of California Davis and specializes in the history of race and ethnicity in the United States, political activism, and oral history. She recently published her first monograph, Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970-1999 with the University of North Carolina Press in 2023. This work chronicles the history of Black, Native American, Chicanx, and Asian American labor and political activists stemming from Seattle. More specifically, she examines how activists built coalitions across ethnic, regional and international lines, challenging racial inequalities, capitalist labor systems, and globalization.
Nominating Committee (vote for one)
Amrit Deol
California State University, Fresno (assistant professor)
Amrit Deol is an 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 non-secular traditions in the Ghadar Party in the early twentieth 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.
Génesis Lara
University of California, Irvine (assistant professor)
Génesis Lara is an assistant professor of Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine. She explores the ways Afro-Dominican women challenged state sanctioned violence during the 1960s and 1970s in the Dominican Republic and the United States. Specifically, Lara studies the ways Dominican women mobilized grief and human rights advocacy to challenge and bear witness to the effects of state sponsored violence in the Dominican Republic and in the United States. Her work has been supported by the Tinker Foundation and several other institutional awards, and has been published in Estudios Sociales. Lara earned her bachelor’s at the University of Florida and Ph.D. at UC Davis, both in Caribbean history with a concentration in African Diasporic Studies. Génesis Lara recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University in collaboration with the National Archives.