Boyd Cothran, who has recently successfully defended his PhD dissertation at the University of Minnesota and currently has a limited-term appointment at Macalester College, has enthusiastically accepted the Dean's offer of a full-time appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor in the Department, effective July 1, 2012.

Boyd Cothran earned his B.A. in History at the University of California at Berkeley in 2005, his M.A. in History at the University of Minnesota in 2008 and will receive his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota later this spring following his successful defence earlier this month. His dissertation focuses on white and Native American memories of the Modoc War in nineteenth-century California. He was the recipient in 2010-11 of a prestigious doctoral fellowship in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Yale University and has published two historical essays in important Indigenous Studies journals along with a book chapter. He has research interests in indigenous history, violence, public memory, and the U.S. west, and his scholarship lies at the intersection of Native American history, cultural history and labour history. He also has plenty of experience in the area of public history, having served as historical consultant with the Klamath County Museum and the Oregon Public Broadcasting for a documentary on the Modoc War.

As you can see, Boyd will add important new strength in U.S. history and indigenous history in the Department, and we are much looking forward to welcoming him in July to our midst. I am sure that he will make a marvellous colleague.

In making this announcement, thanks goes to all members of the Department and Graduate Programme in History who took part in the search, and in particular the Search Committee (Molly Ladd-Taylor, Sakis Gekas, Anne Rubenstein, Marc Stein and Jay Young), which worked so hard to make this search a success. The committee was chaired with great skill and enthusiasm by Molly. Myra Rutherdale played a valuable role throughout as Affirmative Action representative. (Indeed, the university's Affirmative Action committee formally commended the committee on the exhaustively detailed and balanced report that it produced about the search.) With over 200 applications to assess, the committee went above and beyond to ensure that the search was conducted in a fair and equitable manner and reached a successful outcome. The interviews of twelve long-listed candidates at the American Historical Association in Chicago proved a very telling stage of the search. The entire Department is indebted to them for all their efforts.

If you wish to contact Boyd Cothran to welcome him personally to the Department, his email address is currently cothr002@gmail.com.