Peter C. Mancall is the Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute; the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities; Professor of History and Anthropology; and Divisional for the Humanities at USC Dornsife. He is the author of seven books including Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (Penn, 2018); Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson–A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic (Basic Books, 2009); Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (Yale, 2007); Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Cornell, 1995); and, most recently, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale, 2019). He is currently writing American Origins, which will be volume one of the Oxford History of the United States. In 2012 he delivered the Mellon Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and the Royal Historical Society and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. He was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in the 2019-2020 academic year.
Amy Braden is Director of Programs of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. She has previously served as the Director of Programs for the USC Mellon Humanities in a Digital World and the USC Mellon Humanities and the University of the Future grant programs. She received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Southern California in 2010. Her scholarly research focuses on women, early modern performance, and sport. Dr. Braden has twenty years experience teaching undergraduate and graduate literature and writing courses; as a graduate student, she was recognized with the USC University Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2024, she received the USC Dornsife Dean’s Outstanding Staff Award. In her multiple roles at USC, she designs and manages initiatives that communicate the value of humanities research to public audiences.
Laura Dominguez, NEH Postdoctoral Scholar & Research Associate, LA2026
Dr. Laura Dominguez is a historian of race, heritage, and place-keeping. She specializes in co-creating partnerships and projects in California and the West, with expertise in culturally relevant collaborations with women, Latinx, LGBTQ+, immigrant, and Tribal communities. From 2023 to 2025, she served as a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Park Service. She previously worked in advocacy and education for the Los Angeles conservancy and San Francisco Heritage. In 2014, she co-founded Latinos in Heritage Conservation and continues to serve on its Board of Directors. She is also a Trustee of the California Preservation Foundation and a former member of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group.
Dr. Dominguez earned her Ph.D. in History (2023) and her Master of Historic Preservation (2012) from USC. She also holds a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University (2010). Her award-winning dissertation studied the historical power of repair and cultural memory in Los Angeles from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries.
Aidan Diamond is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture. Her publications include articles in Studies in Comics and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, as well as book chapters in The Ascendance of Harley Quinn and Politics in Gotham. She is co-editor of Comics: A Companion (Peter Lang, 2026). Her dissertation examines how climate change revises the apocalyptic plot across films, novels, and comics.
Image: Detail from “Vallard Atlas,” (1547) HM 29 f.1, chart 9, North America, east coast. Portolan atlas. Courtesy of the Huntington Library.
