LSU History Professor Elected President of the American Historical Association

September 9, 2024

BATON ROUGE—LSU Boyd Professor of History Suzanne Marchand has been elected to serve as president of the American Historical Association (AHA) for 2026. The AHA is the largest professional association for historians in the world. Prior to this appointment, she will serve as vice president for 2025.

Founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889, the AHA promotes historical work and the importance of historical thinking in public life. The organization’s mission to enhance the work of historians also encompasses professional standards and ethics, innovative scholarship and teaching, academic freedom, and international collaboration. With 11,000 members worldwide, the AHA serves historians in a wide variety of professions and represents every historical era and geographical area.

Marchand’s research interests include the history of the humanities, with a focus on classical studies, art history, anthropology, history, and theology in modern Europe. She is the author of the award-winning book, “Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe,” which explores the history and culture of art, business, taste, and consumption in Central Europe from the eighteenth century to the present.

She is also the author of “Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1870” (1996) and “German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship” (2009), which won the George Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association.

Marchand was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for intellectual and cultural history in 2022, and most recently the Old Dominion Fellowship from The Humanities Council at Princeton University. She has also received fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftgeschichte also in Berlin and Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence.

She joined the LSU Department of History faculty in 1999, and received her bachelor’s degree from U.C. Berkeley and both her master’s and PhD in history from the University of Chicago.