You are invited to Cullowhee!
September 20-21, 2024
Western Carolina University’s Brinson Honors College is excited to host the 2024 Annual Conference of the North Carolina Honors Association. The conference will be held Friday, September 20th-Saturday, September 21st. We are especially pleased to announce that this year’s conference will be a return to an in-person format. Start planning your trip to the mountains today!
Conference Information
Conference Registration
Check here for information on how to register to attend the 2024 NCHA Conference.
Travel & Lodging
Check here for information on how to get to WCU’s campus in Cullowhee, NC and where to stay while you attend the conference.
Submission Information
Check here for information on the different types of presentation formats available and to submit your conference proposal.
Conference Theme
Here & Now: The Power of Place
The theme of this year’s conference is Here & Now: The Power of Place. Our collective and individual connections to places can influence our behaviors, beliefs, and values. The more we know about a place, the more we can appreciate its cultural and social significance. Exploring the ways in which we discover, create, configure, utilize, maintain, and honor places is important and timely.
While all topics are welcome, we invite you to incorporate this theme of Here & Now: The Power of Place into your oral presentation or poster presentation topic.
Western Carolina University acknowledges this power of place in part through our Land Acknowledgement statement. WCU is situated in the northern Cullowhee Valley, centrally located along the Tuckasegee River in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern North Carolina. This is the Cherokee homeland, and the Qualla Boundary, seat of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, is located about 20 miles downstream from the campus area. It is the only public university established on the site of a named Cherokee town and a traditional sacred place.
Keynote Speaker
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and resides in Qualla, NC with her husband, Evan and sons Ross and Charlie. She holds degrees from Yale University and the College of William and Mary. Her debut novel, Even As We Breathe, was released by the University Press of Kentucky in 2020, a finalist for the Weatherford Award and named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020. In 2021, it received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Her first novel manuscript, Going to Water is winner of the Morning Star Award for Creative Writing from the Native American Literature Symposium (2012) and a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (2014).
Clapsaddle’s work has appeared in Yes! Magazine, Lit Hub, Smoky Mountain Living Magazine, South Writ Large and The Atlantic. After serving as executive director of the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, Annette returned to teaching at Swain County High School for over a dozen years. She is the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies and serves on the Board of Directors for the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and is the President of the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network.
