Through e-mail conversation from June 29, 2017, to December 5, 2017, and at meetings on January 4 and 7, 2018, the Council of the American Historical Association took the following actions:

• Appointed the following members of the 2019 Annual Meeting Program Committee: Ada Ferrer, New York University (Latin America, Caribbean, slavery, nationalism); David Myers, University of California, Los Angeles (Jewish, intellectual, cultural, Zionism); Mark Sheftall, Auburn University and Bucknell University (military, world, British empire); and John Thabiti Willis, Carleton College (Africa, diaspora, religion).
• Approved revisions to the AHA’s open and third-party letters policy for Perspectives on History.
• Approved an amendment to the FY18 Capital Budget to include $42,075 to upgrade the AHA’s association management software and directories.
• Approved signing on to a letter from the Coalition for International Education to members of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce in support of funding for Title VI.
• Approved a Statement on Confederate Monuments on the role of history and historians in public conversations about removing or recontextualizing monuments or renaming public spaces.
• Approved signing on to a statement with other scholarly associations opposing a proposal under consideration by the US Senate to tax graduate student tuition waivers as income, a provision included in the tax reform bill already passed by the US House of Representatives. During the earlier House debate, the Association had urged the full membership to contact their Representatives in opposition to the proposed tax.
• Approved signing on to an American Academy of Arts and Sciences statement urging a greater national effort to strengthen language education so that individual Americans can more effectively participate in a global society and the nation as a whole can prosper in a global economy. [Statement to be published in March 2018]
• Approved the minutes of the June 2017 Council meetings and interim minutes of the Council from June to December 2017.
• Approved the 2018 AHA committee appointments recommended by the Committee on Committees.
• Approved changes to Section 7 of the Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct to include “family status” among the criteria not to be considered when making decisions relating to employment.
• Approved reducing the number of members of the Graduate and Early Career Committee from five to four and removing the co-chair structure.
• Approved a hybrid geographic model for the American Historical Review, to begin in 2021, in which the editor and review consultants (associate review editors) can be located anywhere, while other operations remain at Indiana University. Staff in Washington, DC, and Bloomington, IN, will collaborate during the transition in establishment of new management systems. The AHA and its partners at Oxford University Press will work together to maximize the value of the Review to members of the Association.
• Approved directing the American Historical Review to change any references on its website and other official spaces from “Book Reviews” to “Reviews,” in order to reflect the mission of reviewing important historical work in any medium.
• Approved directing AHA management to synchronize the beginning and ending dates of its contracts with the American Historical Review editors-in-chief and host institutions.
• Approved the development and distribution of a survey to assess the scope of sexual harassment in the discipline.
• Approved the appointment of a committee to articulate a policy framework developed by the Council at its January 7, 2018, meeting that will include statements of best practices regarding the prevention of sexual harassment in the discipline, and policies and procedures for managing sexual harassment issues within AHA spaces (annual meeting and committees, for example). The committee will submit these documents and statements for Council approval at its June 2018 meeting. AHA Teaching Division vice president Liz Lehfeldt will chair the committee, which will also include Kevin Boyle (vice president, Professional Division), Tyler Stovall (immediate past president), Katrin Schultheiss (outgoing chair, AHA Committee on Gender Equity), and Monica Mercado (member, AHA Committee on Gender Equity).
• Received the audit conducted by the independent CPA firm for the fiscal year ending on June 30, 2017.
• Approved hiring Wegner CPA as the AHA’s new independent CPA firm to conduct auditing and tax-filing services.
• Approved removal of references to the controller in the AHA Bylaws to align them with the constitutional changes made in 2016.
• Appointed William Wechsler, vice chair, Capitol Peak Asset Management, to a three-year term as AHA treasurer, beginning July 1, 2018.
• Appointed Keith Hocter, investment consultant and president, Bellwether Consulting, to a three-year term as Investment Committee chair, beginning July 1, 2018.
• Appointed Noel Salinger, director of individual giving at the Smithsonian Institution, to a three-year term as a member of the Finance Committee, beginning July 1, 2018.
• Approved adding the AHA president as a member of the Investment Committee.
• Approved the appointment of a one-year ad hoc committee on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning to draft a statement on the value and significance of the scholarship of teaching and learning to the discipline of history. Members appointed to the committee include David Pace, chair, professor emeritus at Indiana University and president of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History; Laura Westhoff, associate professor of history and education, University of Missouri–St. Louis; Natalie Mendoza, postdoctoral research associate and project lead for the History Teaching & Learning Project (HTLP) at University of Colorado Boulder; Adam Beaver, associate director for teaching and learning, Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University.
• Appointed Joshua L. Reid, University of Washington, chair, and Sarah Shurts, Bergen Community College, co-chair, of the 2020 Annual Meeting Program Committee.
• Selected the 2018 honorary foreign member (name to be released in fall 2018).

This post first appeared on AHA Today.