Keith and Thyra Thomson Honors Convocation at UW Sept. 25

University of Wyoming faculty, staff and students are invited to the 2026 Keith and Thyra Thomson Honors Convocation Friday, Sept. 25, at 2 p.m. in the College of Arts and Sciences auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

The Keith and Thyra Thomson Honors Convocation is a longstanding tradition within the College of Arts and Sciences, celebrating the success of undergraduate students. The event will honor undergraduate students on the 2025-26 honor roll.

It also will feature remarks from UW College of Arts and Sciences Dean Scott Turpen and UW President Shane Reeves, greetings from the Thomson family and two College of Arts and Sciences related videos.

This year’s keynote speaker is Ari Kelman, Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History at the University of California, Davis.

He is the author of “Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War” (Hill and Wang, 2015); “A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek” (Harvard University Press, 2013), a recipient of several national awards and honors, including the Bancroft Prize; and “A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans” (University of California Press, 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize. 

Kelman’s essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Nation, Times Literary Supplement, Journal of American History and Reviews in American History.

He has contributed to outreach endeavors for K-12 educators and to public history projects, including documentary films for the History Channel and PBS’s “American Experience” series. He has received many grants and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library. Kelman also has served on a variety of editorial boards, program and prize committees, and has been in several administrative posts. 

Kelman is now working on a book titled “For Liberty and Empire: How the Civil War Bled into the Indian Wars” and is editing the journal Reviews in American History.

This convocation will feature a performance by the Happy Jacks. A reception will take place immediately after in the College of Arts and Sciences auditorium lobby.

For more information about this event, visit www.uwyo.edu/as, call the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office at (307) 766-4106 or email asdean1@uwyo.edu.