Events
The 46th annual IAH Conference will be held on Saturday April 11, 2026 at Indiana University East in Richmond. Historians, librarians, archivists, K-12 teachers, graduate students, and college and university scholars will gather to explore the conference theme “History in Unexpected Places – Rethinking and Reimagining History in the Early 21st Century.” Our Call for Papers is now available!
Image courtesy of IU East. IU East Campus Map.
We are thrilled to announce our conference keynote speaker, Dr. Susan Sleeper-Smith, who will give the Robert M. Taylor Memorial Lecture titled, “Why American Indian History Matters in Indiana.”
Dr. Sleeper-Smith joined the Michigan State department of history in 1994, was promoted to full professor in 2008; served as Director of the CIC-American Indian Studies Consortium from 2008 to 2010; and was the Interim Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2018. She retired from Michigan State in 2021 but resides as a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library. Dr. Sleeper-Smith’s research explores history as a narrative structured by sites of encounter, where the interaction of diverse Indigenous people with settler colonists created new and ongoing processes of social and cultural change. Her writing focuses on Native American women and their continued involvement in that process.
Dr. Sleeper-Smith’s book Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women in the Ohio River Valley, 1691-1792, published in 2018, follows five previously published university press books: Indian Women and French Men; New Faces of the Fur Trade; Contesting Knowledge; Rethinking the Fur Trade; and Why You Can’t Teach U.S. History Without American Indians. Violence in Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present was published in 2021 with Professors Jeff Ostler and Josh Reid. Her current research focuses on the role that Indigenous women played in thwarting federal policies of forced removal and how their efforts led to Native survivance.
Important Dates
- Fri. Jan. 16, 2026: IAH Conference Paper and Panel Proposals Due
- Fri. Feb. 6, 2026: Bennett-Tinsley Award for Undergraduate History Research and Writing Submissions Due
- Sat. April 11, 2026: IAH 46th Annual Conference at IU East in Richmond
Thornbrough Lecture Series
The Thornbrough Lecture Series is an annual series on African American history, sponsored by the Indiana Association of Historians, which takes place every fall. The lectures honor the lives and careers of sisters Gayle and Emma Lou Thornbrough. Gayle (1914-1999) made a lasting contribution to Indiana history as librarian, editor, and administrator. Emma Lou (1913-1994) was a professor, researcher, and author who left a profound mark on Indiana history.
The 2025 Thornbrough Lecture was held on September 30 from 6:00-7:30 p.m. at the Indiana Historical Society in downtown Indianapolis. This year’s distinguished lecturer, Dr. Ashley Howard, presented “It’s Time to Stop Asking and Start Taking: Urban Rebellions as Working-Class Politics.” Dr. Howard is the Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa with research interests in the Black Midwest, Black freedom dreams, and social movements.
Dr. Howard’s work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, BBC World News Hour, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, Washington Post and NPR. Her “Then the Burnings Began” article is the winner of the 2018 James L. Sellers Memorial Prize.
Past Thornbrough Lectures:
2024: Dr. Crystal Moten, Obama Presidential Center Museum, “Continually Working: Black Women’s Struggles for Economic Justice in the Midwest”
2023: Dr. Kate Masur, Northwestern University,“We Ask Only for Evenhanded Justice: Fighting the Black Laws in the Antebellum Midwest”
2022: Dr. Charlene Fletcher, Conner Prairie, “For Whose Protection?: Black Women and Confinement in the late-19th Century”
2021: Dr. Terrion Williamson, University of Minnesota, “We Live with Death and It Is Ours: Black Women, Serial Murder, and Reckoning with Home”
2020: Dr. Laura Merrifield Wilson, University of Indianapolis, “The True Political Pioneer: Harriette Baily Conn”
Events Around The State