AHA 26 Roundtable Announcement
The Toynbee Prize Foundation is pleased to announce a roundtable in collaboration with the Journal of Global History at the American Historical Association's Annual Meeting 2026, taking place in Chicago. The event will mark 20 years of the Journal of Global History, bringing together members of the editorial team behind the Journal to reflect on how it has reflected the contours of the field itself. JGH defines its primary aim as an open access peer-reviewed publication, to be the "to be the leading scholarly outlet for innovative analyses of global historical phenomena." The roundtable will explore how the Journal has approached this goal over the past two decades, what has changed, and what the future holds.
The roundtable discussion will take place on January 8 from 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM. Please find more information on the location of the panel in the AHA program, linked here.
It is with pleasure that we introduce our roundtable participants below:
Elisabeth Leake is an associate professor of history and the Lee E. Dirks Chair in Diplomatic History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. She is the author of The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonization, 1936-65 and the award-winning Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan. Her next book is Freedom! A Global History of Decolonization. She is currently chief editor of the Journal of Global History.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington is Bradley Distinguished Professor at Adelaide University. The author of 12 books on historiography published in six languages, she has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Global History since 2006 and is on the editorial board of the Cambridge Elements in Historical Theory and Practice. Since 2019, her focus has been on the relationship between history and artificial intelligence and she has published over half a dozen articles on the topic. Her most recent book is Artificial Historians (2025, with Australian Aboriginal Elders Anne Martin and Lewis Yurlapurka O’Brien).
Merry Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the long-time senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal, editor-in-chief of the seven-volume Cambridge World History (2015), co-editor, with Mathew Kuefler, of the four-volume Cambridge World History of Sexualities (2024), and formereditor of the Journal of Global History (2011-2020). She is the author or editor of many articles and forty books that have appeared in ten European and Asian languages, including most recently Women and the Reformations: A Global History (Yale 2024).
Michael Christopher Low is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. Low received his PhD from Columbia University in 2015 and previously taught at Iowa State University. He is the author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020). In 2021,Imperial Mecca received the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award. Imperial Mecca has since been translated into Arabic and Turkish. Low is also co-editor of The Subjects of Ottoman International Law (Indiana University Press, 2020). His current book project, Saltwater Kingdoms: Fossil-Fueled Water and Climate Change (under contract with University of California Press), examines desalination, infrastructure, energy, and climate change in the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Low is the Series Editor of Transregional Middle Easts (University of Utah Press). He also serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Turkish Studies, Journal of Global History, Journal of Tourism History, and the Middle East Environmental Histories book series from Leiden University Press.
