As a Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, as well as Dean’s Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, Natalia Molina is one of the most celebrated faculty members of the ASE Department.  Her research explores the interconnected histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship.  Dr. Molina is the author of three award-winning books:  Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles (2006); How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (2014); and most recently, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community (2022), which also was a finalist for the James Beard Award.  This book chronicles the lives of immigrant workers, including Molina’s grandmother, who became placemakers, nurturing and feeding their communities at restaurants that served as urban anchors.

            In 2020, Natalia Molina was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, becoming the second ASE faculty member (the first was Dr. Viet Nguyen) so honored.  Molina will become the President of the Organization of American Historians in 2028, the largest scholarly organization focused on U.S. history with over 6,000 members.  She has also served as a councilmember of the Library of Congress, on the advisory board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and as the W.M. Keck Interim Director of Research at the Huntington Library.  Having won numerous teaching awards and the USC Faculty Mentoring Award for Mentoring Graduate Students in 2023-24, Molina also regularly writes for the wider public, being published by the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.  Professor Molina is currently working on a new book, The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington Library: A History of Its Immigrant Workers.