SOCIETY FOR HISTORIANS OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS
1301 E. Main Street, Box 23
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
Email: [email protected]

Cate Dillon
White House Liaison
U.S. Department of State
[email protected]

Call for Papers
7th Annual Women in Baseball Virtual Conference
Women Beyond the Diamond
September 19-21, 2025

Topics can focus on ideas such as: announcers, owners, execs, writers, artists, architects and so much more. All topics and time periods related to women’s baseball are welcome.

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS 

Dick Arndt Prize for an Outstanding Work on Cultural Diplomacy. 

This moment is overwhelming. Each day we wake up to new attacks on history; the humanities; libraries, museums, and archives; and colleges and universities, as well as individual faculty, scholars, and students. We work from the resolute belief that scholarship, teaching, and free inquiry are essential for democracy. As a scholarly organization committed to careful historical analysis of the role of the United States in the world, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) denounces the attacks on these values. 

SHAFR and its leadership have signed statements on the political assault on the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, and the National Park Service. Yet the situation continues to worsen. We have recently witnessed the shutting down of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars; the arrest, detention, and deportation of students and faculty who are green-card and visa holders for their exercise of free speech; the attacks on all efforts to make our campuses and organizations inclusive and welcoming for all; and the Trump administration’s refusal to respect judicial and congressional authority. We have seen attempts to rewrite history for the sake of partisan agendas, and both the Federal and Presidential Records Act have been violated.

April 2, 2025

The Smithsonian Institution is a national treasure. It is a repository of knowledge and a site of learning. The Smithsonian museums and educational programs reach Americans and international visitors from around the world, telling stories of outer space and ordinary spaces, histories of hope and struggle, and histories of collaborative achievement.

Call for nominations for Peace History Society book and article prizes

SHAFR letter to President Trump regarding the removal of the Archivist of the United States

The text of the letter is reproduced below:

SHAFR Council voted unanimously to sign on to this statement on February 9^th.

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SHAFR Second Book Workshop

SHAFR welcomes applications for participants in a Second Book Workshop scheduled to take place in person on Wednesday June 25 (8:00am–5:00pm), right before the SHAFR Annual Meeting in Arlington, VA. This initiative is aimed at mid-career scholars who are researching/writing their second book and who would like to have a productive environment in which to receive feedback on their work. Participants will be part of a group of peers; they will give comments to others and receive feedback themselves. 

Selection process: The screening committee (formed by three members of the Women in SHAFR committee plus two other experienced SHAFR scholars) will select twelve participants in a two-stage process. In the first stage, they will select potential participants based on the excellence of their work in terms of originality, rigor, and significance. In the second stage, they will rank the applicants who have passed the first round depending on their belonging to a “priority group” (see below).

Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize

This year’s Bernath Lecture committee (Paul Chamberlin, Thomas Field, and Kelly Shannon) has selected Professor Amanda Demmer of Virginia Tech University to receive the 2025 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize. An award-winning scholar and teacher, Professor Demmer’s two major research projects highlight some of the most exciting new developments in foreign relations history. Her 2022 book, After Saigon's Fall, has been widely acclaimed as one of the best recent examples of how to cross analyze histories diplomacy and migration. Meanwhile, her current project on Ginetta Sagan demonstrates Demmer's sustained interest in the diplomatic agency of nonstate actors while further historicizing our understanding of the contested realm of international human rights. Her work promises to shed a clarifying light on how developments in the 1970s came to define our times. Furthermore, she is a rising star who is sure to point the way for the next generation of foreign relations historians.