Young Historians Conference

The Young Historians 2024 Conference Winners

Julian Balsley (Grant HS), Jake McCauley (Grant HS), Maia Lippay (St. Mary's Academy)

First Place: Julian Balsley (Grant High School)
Identity in Question: Middle Eastern Americans in Dearborn, Michigan

Second Place: Jake McCauley (Grant High School) 
Priscus at the Court of Attila: Unveiling Hunnic Dynamics 

Third Place: Maia Lippay (St. Mary's Academy) 
Marshlands and Monasteries:  The Impact of Weapon Deposition on Medieval British Christianity 

The 2024 Young Historians Conference Schedule (PDF)

The 2024 Young Historians Program with Abstracts (PDF)

The 34th annual Young Historians Conference will held at Portland State University on May 3rd, 2024. The conference brings together PSU’s history department and area high schools that participate in college level history classes, such as the PSU Challenge Program, other dual credit programs, or AP history. Courses include, but are not limited to, American History, Western Civilization, and World History. Courses must include a major assignment that is a history research paper. History instructors select the best of these for the student authors to submit for consideration. A history department lead faculty member works with a jury of history graduate students to assess the submissions and choose up to 30 papers for the presentation. 

The conference is organized into concurrent sessions by themes determined by the Jury and lead faculty member. Each session has at least three presenters who have approximately 10 minutes to present their paper. The audience is made up of their classmates and a faculty moderator from the history department. At the end of the presentations, the faculty moderator leads a discussion.

Awards are given for the best papers. Authors of the top papers are encouraged to submit their work to PDXScholar, PSU's online repository of scholarly works. To view information about PDXScholar's readership information and number of downloads, click here.

Guidelines for submissions:

• Paper format should be a google word doc with editing enabled for cplink@pdx.edu. If students don't have a google account they can send it as a Word Document
• All submissions must include the research paper, abstract, and title page emailed to cplink@pdx.edu as one document.
• Every paper should contain the student's name, paper title, school, and history course on the first page of document