Oct. 4-7: 52nd annual Great Plains History conference features Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Fenn

The University of North Dakota is proud to host the 52nd annual gathering of historians who live and work in the Northern Great Plains region. The conference hosts scholars working in a variety of fields, including those interested in European, Asian, African, Canadian and American history. This year’s conference will convene Oct. 4 and conclude Oct. 7.

This year our keynote speaker will be Elizabeth Fenn, UColorado, Boulder, who won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction with Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People.  She will speak at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6 at the Ramada Inn, Banquet Room.  This event, after dinner, will be open to the public.  She will be available for a book signing just after the banquet.

The conference will be held at the Ramada Inn in Grand Forks. Additional sessions will be held on the UND campus.

The Northern Great Plains History Conference is a professional gathering of scholars, affiliated and independent, public historians, history students, graduate and undergraduate and other practitioners of history who live and work in the area of the Northern Great Plains of the United States and the Southern Great Plains of Canada. They present papers and roundtables in history subjects from around the globe and throughout time. The conference began 52 years ago in Grand Forks and continues to offer a forum for the latest historical scholarship by those who live and work in the region. The Society for Military History also offers panels at the Northern Great Plains History Conference annually. The conference is hosted by member institutions and moves to a new location every year.

We have 36 sessions and more than 120 papers/panelists.  Sessions are devoted to World War I, woman suffrage, bigfoot, South Dakota, Canada, the NPL, teaching methods, world history, and lots more.  Students from the University of Mary will be doing a readers’ theatre of letters from World War I.

The full schedule is available here.

— Kimberly Porter, History