Amber J. Santoro
Biography
Amber J. Santoro is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the Van Hunnick History Department at USC. Her dissertation, “’Are Our Foreign Residents to Become Assets or Liabilities?’: Juvenile Welfare, Assimilation, and the Making of a Social-Scientific Los Angeles, 1911-1945,” situates early twentieth-century Los Angeles as a “social-scientific” laboratory in which universities, philanthropic individuals and institutions, and welfare institutions converged to surveil and manage foreign-born and non-white juvenile populations. Her project reveals how anxieties about assimilation, juvenile delinquency, and population control shaped ostensibly benevolent regimes of care and oversight in the urban West. She shows how these regimes of care provided the professionalized mechanisms necessary to sort, modify, and pathologize populations across the United States, permanently codifying the state’s power to decide which lives were “assets” and which were “liabilities.”
Amber has been awarded multiple fellowships, including the Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability Graduate Fellowship and the USC Libraries Summer Primary Source Research Fellowship, which supported her archival digital humanities project on the history of freeway construction and community displacement in Los Angeles. Most recently, she received the Goldsmith Summer Fellowship for her dissertation research.
Amber is passionate about public outreach and accessibility. She has been an invited speaker at events such as the 2nd District Racial Justice Learning Exchange (RJLE) hosted by Holly J. Mitchell, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. She has also given talks on her research for the USC Sustainability Hub and the Los Angeles Service Academy. Her work for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West Blog explores the intersection of race, tuberculosis, and public health at Olive View Sanitarium, blending historical analysis with her own great-grandmother’s connection to the institution.
Amber will present a chapter of her dissertation research at the Western Historical Association’s 2026 Conference in Portland, OR, as part of the “New Directions in Disability History of the West” panel.
Education
- BA Calif St Poly Univ Pomona
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Research Keywords
Progressive Era, History of Eugenics, Public Health, Race, Social Welfare, Disability Urban History, Environmental, Carceral History, Digital Humanities, Los Angeles & the American West
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Conference Presentations
- “Laboratories of Reform: (Dis)ability, Delinquency, and the All Nations Child Welfare Clinic.” Accepted for presentation at the Western Historical Association. Portland, OR , 10/2026
- “Digital Humanities and Displacement Narratives Along the Century/105 Freeway.” Presented at the Urban History Association. Los Angeles, CA , 10/2025
- “Bridging Digital Humanities & Community Displacement.” Presented at the Wrigley Institute Annual Research Symposium. Los Angeles, CA , 3/2024
Other Presentations
- “The History of Century/105 Freeway Displacement.” Invited Guest Speaker., 2nd District Racial Justice Learning Exchange (RJLE) hosted by Holly J. Mitchell, Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors., Los Angeles, CA, 2024-2025
- “Driven Apart: Community Displacement Along the Century/105 Freeway.” Invited Talk. , USC Sustainability Hub Event, Los Angeles, CA, 2023-2024
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- Los Angeles Service Academy (LASA) Session on Purp: “Family History, Race, and Tuberculosis in Early 20th-Century Los Angeles.” Invited Guest Speaker. Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA. https://dornsife.usc.edu/lasa/2026/01/25/from-poetry-to-public-health/., 01/24/2026
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- Archival Digital Exhibition, “Driven Apart: Community Displacement Along the Century/105 Freeway.” https://dornsife.usc.edu/wrigley/2024/04/26/sustainability-graduate-fellow-studies-freeway-construction-and-community-displacement/., Spring 2023
- Huntington-USC Institute on California and the Wes, “Olive View Sanitarium: Race, Illness, and Family History in Early 20th-Century Los Angeles.” https://dornsife.usc.edu/icw/2024/07/29/olive-view-sanitarium-race-illness-and-family-history-in-early-20th-century-los-angeles/., Fall 2024
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- Karol Goldsmith Summer Research Fellowship , 2026 –
- Karol Goldsmith Summer Research Fellowship, 2025 –
- Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability Graduate Fellowship, 2024 –
- USC Libraries Inaugural Summer Primary Source Research on Sustainability Fellowship , 2023-2024
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Committees
- Member, ‘Root Shock’: New Digital Technologies and Urban Displacement, USC Levan Institute for the Humanities and the USC Ahmanson Lab Interdisciplinary Working Group., 2024-2025
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Professional Memberships
- Urban History Association (UHA), 2025 –
- Western History Association (WHA), 2023 –
- Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW), 2022 –
- Organization of American Historians (OAH), 2022 –