AHA Annual Meeting 2010: a preview

At AHA, I’ll be presenting my research about native-born Americans without birth certificates during World War II as part of a panel I organized on Identity Documentation and the Modern Western State, Friday 2:30-4:30 in the Point Loma Room (Marriott).

The 2010 annual meeting of the American Historical Association kicks off in a few days in San Diego. There’s been a little discussion about it on Twitter so far (hashtag #aha2010), and that will undoubtedly continue throughout the conference. (For budget reasons, there’s no internet access planned for the conference rooms, but each of the conference hotels will have an internet-enabled message room. Expect a time lag on reports from conferencegoers.)

Here are some of the sessions I’d love to attend, though of course I won’t make it to all of them. If you’d like to point out something else that looks especially interesting to you, or to engage in blatant self-promotion about your own panel, feel free to do so in the comments below, or to link to writeups on anything you attend.

Thursday, January 7

I’m interested in meeting people with similar historical interests— identification documents, 20th century US political/social history, gender/sexuality, digital methods. Feel free to drop me email or a tweet if you’d like to meet for coffee or drinks, or just introduce yourself.

3-5pm:

• Is Google Good For History? A roundtable discussion on the tradeoffs of access and corporate control involved in Google’s digitization of older print works. (Sadly, I can’t attend due to travel timing.)
• Citizenship and Property Rights: Gender and the Allotment of Native American Reservations

Friday, January 8:

9:30-11:30:

• Prurient Politics: Sexuality and Obscenity in the Twentieth-Century United States
• The Humanities in the Digital Age digital poster session on tools for historical research, teaching, and collaboration

2:30-4:30: (cross-scheduled against my panel, alas)

• Polynesian Experimental Canoe Voyaging and Revival Speakers from the Polynesian Voyaging Society talk about the traditional arts of Pacific navigation without instruments.
• The Politics of Marriage in Comparative Perspective: Imperial Legacies in Early America and Colonial India
• Constructing a National Body: Disability, Race, and Gender in the United States

Saturday, January 9

9-11am:

• Access Denied: Comparative Biopolitical Perspectives on Marriage Restriction
• Underground Archives of Native American and African American History

I’ll be at the Coordinating Council for Women and History luncheon on Saturday and the CGLBTH reception on Saturday night.

11:30am-1pm:

• Educating the Citizen: American Colonial Education among Latinos, Hawaiians, and Filipinos

2-4pm:

• Rethinking the Queer 1970s: A Roundtable on Multiracial, Multi-Issue, and Transnational Politics
• Four New England Towns Turn Forty: A Portrait of the New Social History in Middle Age The authors of the 1970 New England town studies—Demos, Lockridge, Greven, Zuckerman—all talking about those works after 40 years.
• Recursive Subjects: Sexuality and the “State” in South Asia

Sunday, January 10

8:30-10:30am:

• Thinking about Race, Sexuality, and Marriage: A Roundtable on Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally

11am-1pm:

• Reinventing Childhood in the Post-World War II World: A Roundtable
• Teaching the American Right in the United States and Abroad
• Shifting Discourses of Race during the Cold War Era