The American Historical Association will hold its 130th annual meeting January 7–10, 2016, in Atlanta, Georgia.

The theme for the meeting, is “Global Migrations: Empires, Nations, and Neighbors.”

The movement of people, ideas, and goods has shaped human history, igniting the imagination, etching the landscape, and transforming identity. For educators and scholars, migration represents a powerful lens through which to reconstruct sacred travel, trace trade routes, illuminate diasporas, and map the scale and scope of globalization. However, our conversations on the subject tend to be bound within the norms and conventions of intradisciplinary specialties or by temporal or continental divides. With this theme, the organisers hope to facilitate more dialogue among colleagues that may enrich research, teaching, and public knowledge.

Global migrations occur in the everyday given the confluence of peoples and cultures in motion. Tourism, for example, represents a form of migration whether for religious pilgrimages, health care, or recreation. The mediation of memory found in private thoughts and public commemorations contributes to our understanding of our past and present. For example, the contestation of memory that played out in a scene from John Sayles’s film Lone Star in which a young history teacher defended her curriculum against angry parents perhaps foretold the current controversy over what can be taught in history classrooms across Texas. Indeed, as practitioners of history, we have expanded our toolkit to include research methodologies and critical theories from the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and at times the sciences.

The AHA is a capacious organization, unique among learned societies in its devotion to the full range of historical scholarship and practice. The organisers hope that their program will reflect this strength.

The program is available online here.