Committee on LGBTQ Status in the Profession
Established: 2015
Purpose: To monitor the status of LGBTQ issues within the historical profession, recommend policies and best practices in that regard, and undertake projects addressing the status of both LGBTQ historians and LGBTQ history.
- To review AHA policy statements and best practices documents that address fair treatment and nondiscrimination, and recommend amendments to these statements that would refer consistently and comprehensively to sex, gender, gender expression, gender identity, sexual orientation, and marital status.
- To review antidiscrimination action and employment equity goals in language used in various AHA policies and practices.
- To create best practices documents as guidance for implementing LGBTQ-sensitive measures in hiring/search guidelines and promotion/tenure guidelines.
- To create sessions at the annual meeting on topics relevant to the work of the committee (e.g. job markets and employment experiences for LGBTQ historians), determine which panel proposals might be appropriate for LGBTQ committee co-sponsorship, and look for possibilities of creating multi-session workshops or thematic strands from the full list of program sessions.
- To work with the Teaching Division to form a committee of historians teaching in various types of institutions to write an LGBTQ Teaching Guide. The TD recommends reaching out to historians in states such as California and New York where LGBTQ history has been incorporated into state standards.
- To work with the Professional Division to produce a series of Perspectives articles bringing attention to key issues for LGBTQ historians and those doing LGBTQ history in the discipline.
- To work with the Professional Division in order to make job market articles in Perspectives more LGBTQ-inclusive by adding LGBTQ historians and history as a discrete category when appropriate.
- To enhance, in conjunction with the Research Division, the field of LGBTQ history by promoting scholarship in the field.
Membership: 5 members
Assignment to Division: Reports on its work to the Council, works with appropriate divisions and committees on specific issues.
Members
Claire Potter, New School, chair
Christina Carney, Univ. of Missouri, Columbia
Victor Macias-Gonzalez, Univ. of Wisconsin, La Crosse
Nathan Marvin, Univ. of Arkansas, Little Rock
Charles Shindo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge
Staff
Debbie Ann Doyle, Director of Meetings
Contact the committee at lgbtqcommittee@historians.org.
Resources
Donate to the LGBTQ History Research Fund
The AHA's Committee on LGBTQ Status in the Profession is raising funds to support an annual $500 grant to support new and continuing research in LGBTQ history, available to scholars working in all temporal and geographic fields. Open to scholars at all career levels, this grant will especially serve graduate students and early career researchers working on LGBTQ history.
We invite donations of any amount to contribute to initial funding for this grant via the AHA's donations page of the AHA.