Western History Dissertation Workshop

Each year, a consortium of centers and institutes whose research focuses on the American West gather together to host a dissertation workshop. Five awarded graduate students at an advanced stage in writing a dissertation exploring any topic dealing with the history and culture of the American West have the opportunity to present a chapter at the workshop and to receive feedback from other participants and from senior scholars affiliated with the sponsoring institutions.  Each year a different sponsoring institution hosts the workshop.

The eleventh annual Western History Dissertation Workshop was held in May 2016 hosted by the Clements Center for  Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University’s satellite campus at SMU-in-Taos.  

This year’s workshop was hosted by Andrew Graybill, Neil Foley, and Ruth Ann Elmore from the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU, with co-sponsorship provided by the following centers and institutes: Johnny Mack Faragher from the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University; Joshua Reid from the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Washington; the Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico; Steve Aron from the Autry National Center/University of California-Los Angeles Department of History; William Deverell from the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West; the Research Division of the Huntington Library; Louis Warren and Rachel St. John from the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas at the University of California-Davis; Stanford University; Phoebe Young from the Center for the American West/University of Colorado-Boulder Department of History; and Katrina Jagodinsky from the Center for Great Plains Studies/Department of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Participating Dissertators included:

Jeannette Alden Estruth, New York University
Alina R. Mendez, University of California-Davis
Margaret Boren Neubauer, SMU
Tommy Richards, Temple University
Kevin Waite, University of Pennsylvania

Image: Participants in the Western History Dissertation Workshop enjoy a night out together in Taos, NM.