On April 26, 2018, the U.S. Senate confirmed Jon Parrish Peede as the 11th Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mr. Peede has devoted many years to enhancing the well-being of the humanities and the arts. He has served as the Publisher of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) at the University of Virginia, Literature Grants Director at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Counselor to NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, and Director of the NEA Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience program. In his tour of duty as Chair, Mr. Peede has been an indefatigable advocate for the NEH, taking every opportunity to make the case for the value of the humanities to the United States, and maintaining a healthy level of support for the NEH.

Chairman Peede will join the Center of the American West’s Faculty Director Patty Limerick, who was confirmed by the Senate as a member of the National Council for the Humanities in November of 2015, for a wide-ranging discussion of tradition and change in the work of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as Chairman Peede's commitment to making certain that activities supported by the NEH take place across the nation, steering clear of the risk that those activities might occur disproportionately on the "coasts." And, as region-centered scholars, they will compare the role of the humanities in reckoning with the historical legacies of the American South and the American West, while engaging in a congenial dispute over whether writers of history perform a greater service to history than writers of poetry and fiction.