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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 ÃÛÌÒ½´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.