2020 Events

Alicia Gutierrez-Romine is author of From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920-1969. She examines the history of criminal abortion in California and the role abortion providers played in exposing and exploiting the faults in California’s anti-abortion statute throughout the twentieth century. Focused on the women who used this underground network and the physicians who facilitated it, Gutierrez-Romine describes the operation of abortion providers from the 1920s through the 1960s, including regular physicians as well as women and African American abortionists, and the investigations and trials that surrounded them.

Thomas Richards, Jr. is a historian of the US early republic. He received his PhD from Temple University in 2016, and has received fellowships from the Clements Center for Southwest Studies, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Huntington Library, the Bancroft Library, and the Charles Redd Center for Western History. He is currently working on a book project about Americans’ search for alternative political formulations during the early republic. He is proud to call Philadelphia home, where he currently teaches history at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy.

Alice Baumgartner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California, where she teaches courses on 19th century North America. She received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University and an M.Phil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford. Her first book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to Civil War, published in 2020, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, and the Western Historical Quarterly, among others.

Albert Broussard is the author of numerous books, including Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), American History: The Early Years to 1877 with Donald A. Ritchie (Glencoe/McGraw Hill, 1997), African American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853-1963 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), and The American Vision with Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, James M. McPherson, and Donald A. Ritchie (Glencoe/ McGraw Hill, 2002).  His recent work includes considerations of African American civil rights dialogues in Hawai’i.

Linda Chilton is the USC Sea Grant Education Programs Manager. She is responsible for developing, implementing, and coordinating a wide range of educational programs focusing on both students and teachers.  She participates with COSEE-West in co-designing and teaching workshops for teachers bringing scientists and educators together to exchange and facilitate learning on current marine science topics.  She is part of the leadership team for the Los Angeles Charter School Science Project serving 3rd – 8th grade teachers. Ms. Chilton serves as a founding partner on the Key to the Sea Program, a school-aquarium watershed education collaboration. She facilitates the single and multi-day Island Explorer bringing underserved middle and high school students to Catalina Island for field experiences. She works with partners in implementing the Parent Child programs offered through USC Sea Grant.

Desireé Reneé Martinez has extensive experience consulting with Native American leaders and community members in a variety of contexts including the collection of ethnographic and historic data from an indigenous perspective and the implementation of community-based research.

In addition, Ms. Martinez has vast experience in inventorying, cataloging, lab analysis, archive management, and museum collections management through her work as a Task Manager and lithic analyst at Cogstone, Curatorial Assistant at the Harvard Peabody Museum, Project Manager at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and providing curatorial assistance to the UCLA NAGPRA Coordinator and teaching curatorial and archival techniques to students at California State University, Long Beach.

Alyssa Mann is a Project Director for Climate Resilience at The Nature Conservancy. She is based in Los Angeles, CA, and focuses on developing and implementing nature-based strategies to ensure a more resilient California. Some recent projects include restoring and revitalizing Ormond Beach in Oxnard, nature-based adaptation of Highway 1 at Elkhorn Slough in Monterey County, and developing resilience strategies for the Point Mugu naval base and surrounding wetlands. Prior to joining TNC, Alyssa worked at the NOAA Sea Grant program at the University of Southern California (USC), where she focused on planning for climate change impacts along the coast and building community resilience. Her background is in emergency management and international affairs, having worked at multiple federal and state government agencies, including FEMA, the U.S. Department of State, and the State of California. She received her M.P.A from USC and B.A. from the University of Puget Sound. She also received multiple fellowships including the Presidential Management Fellowship and the California Governor’s Executive Fellowship.

Dr. Joe Árvai is the Dana and David Dornsife Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology, and he is the Director of the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California.

In advance of this agenda, Joe and his lab of post-doctoral scholars and graduate students conduct research aimed at improving our understanding of how people intuitively make judgments and decisions about, primarily, environmental issues and sustainability. They couple this research with the development and testing of tools and approaches that can be used by people to improve decision quality across a broad range of environmental, social, and economic contexts. Decision quality, in this case, is measured by the degree to which people’s values and objectives align with their ultimate judgments and choices.

Christopher Cannon is the director of environmental management for the Port of Los Angeles, a position he has held since October 2010. In 2015, he was named chief sustainability officer of the Port.

In this role, Cannon is responsible for balancing commerce and growth with ecological sustainability and social responsibility at the nation’s busiest container port. The Environmental Management Division provides full environmental services related to water, soils and sediments, air and biological resources, and is responsible for preparation of environmental impact assessments mandated by state and federal law; special studies involving dredging, noise abatement, water quality and air quality; site restoration, remediation and contamination characterizations; wildlife management; and establishment of policies regarding environmental quality issues.

Jill Sohm is as a biological oceanographer and microbial ecologist, primarily interested in microbial activity measurements related to the nitrogen cycle, and how microbes and biogeochemical cycles interact. Involving undergraduates in research is my current major focus, and students have worked on projects such as: mapping of water pollution sources and comparison to socioeconomic data; nitrogen fixation associated with degradation of invasive Sargassum; nitrogen cycling activity and players in aquaponics food systems; and native shoreline community restorations ability to prevent shoreline erosion (associated with the Living Shorelines project run by Orange County Coastkeeper).

Austin Hendy is the Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. In 2007, he obtained his doctorate at the University of Cincinnati, followed by post-doctoral fellowships at Yale University, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution, and Florida Museum of Natural History. An author on numerous scientific papers, he has conducted research in many parts of the world, but especially tropical South America. There he studies the biodiversity, biogeography and paleoecology of Cenozoic mollusc faunas. He is also interested in bioinformatics and the application of natural museum specimens and data for K-12 education.

Art Castro is the Manager of Watershed Management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

Josh West is Professor of Earth Sciences and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. His area of speciality focuses on the chemical processes operating at the Earth’s surface — an area known as low-temperature geochemistry. Understanding these processes is a critical scientific problem, fundamental to questions ranging from how the planet’s carbon cycle works to what determines the characteristics of important natural resources, such as soils and groundwaters. My research group is particularly interested in how chemical and physical processes are related, and much of our research lies at the intersection of geochemistry with geomorphology, the study of the shape of the Earth’s surface. Our research approach combines fieldwork, lab analysis, and data modeling. Please see my personal website – linked above – for more information.

Josh West is Professor of Earth Sciences and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California. His area of speciality focuses on the chemical processes operating at the Earth’s surface — an area known as low-temperature geochemistry. Understanding these processes is a critical scientific problem, fundamental to questions ranging from how the planet’s carbon cycle works to what determines the characteristics of important natural resources, such as soils and groundwaters. My research group is particularly interested in how chemical and physical processes are related, and much of our research lies at the intersection of geochemistry with geomorphology, the study of the shape of the Earth’s surface. Our research approach combines fieldwork, lab analysis, and data modeling. Please see my personal website – linked above – for more information.

Jared Dahl Aldern is a historical ecologist and a fire practitioner, who has worked in academia, K-12 education, and tribal government. An affiliated research scholar at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, he has taught Native American history at Palomar College, San Diego State University, and Stanford University.

Theresa Gregor is a descendant of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel (Kumeyaay) as well as Yoeme (Yaqui). She is assistant professor of American Indian Studies at CSU Long Beach and earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in English at the University of Southern California. Before her tenure-track position at CSULB, she was an Adjunct Professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at CSU San Marcos and worked as the Lead Researcher for the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center. She also taught previously in the Departments of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of San Diego. Her tribal community work includes serving as the Executive Director of the Inter-Tribal Long Term Recovery Foundation, a nonprofit organization with a mission to strengthen and enhance the coordination of disaster preparedness and recovery efforts on tribal lands in Southern California. She currently serves on the Native Advisory Council at CSU San Marcos (present-2010). Recent publications include “Revising Critically Endangered Native Languages in California: Case Studies and Promising Practices” with Stan Rodriguez in On Indian Ground: California (2016) and the State of American Indian and Alaska Native Education in California Report (2016) with Dr. Joely Proudfit.

Suzanne Noruschat is Southern California Studies Specialist in Special Collections at University of Southern California Libraries, where she oversees the Regional History Collection.  She is trained as both an archivist and architectural historian, and has had a longstanding interest in the history of Los Angeles, the city from which she hails.  She received the MLIS from the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles and, prior to joining USC Libraries, was Architectural Records Archivist in Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library.  She received the PhD from the Department of Art History at Emory University, and has taught architectural and art history at both Emory and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Dr. Selma Calmes began her career in anesthesiology in the 1960s when there were few women in the specialty and women physicians were expected to choose between having a career or raising a family. To do both, she has drawn inspiration from the experiences of other women in medicine and is one of the founders of the Anesthesia History Association.

In 1970, after working as a staff anesthesiologist and instructor in Pennsylvania, Dr. Calmes moved to California to take up a position as staff anesthiologist at Valley Children’s Hospital in Fresno. She has remained in California ever since, mostly at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1986 she was made chair of the department of anesthesiology at Kern Medical Center, and in 1988 she was named chair of the department of anesthesiology at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center. She still holds both positions and in 1994 was also made vice-chair of the department of anesthesiology at UCLA School of Medicine.

Emily K. Abel is a historian of medicine and public health. Her book, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850-1940 (Harvard University Press, 2000), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 2000. Her two books on the history of tuberculosis in Los Angeles are Suffering in the Land of Sunshine: A Los Angeles Illness Narrative (Rutgers University Press, 2006) and Tuberculosis and the Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (Rutgers University Press, 2007), which won the Viseltear Prize of the Medical Section of the American Public Health Association for an outstanding book in the history of public health. Her most recent book is After the Cure: Untold Stories of Breast Cancer Survivors (NYU Press, 1908), co-written with Saskia Subramanian.

Dr. Peter Blodgett received his bachelor’s degree in American history from Bowdoin College and his doctorate from Yale University. Since joining The Huntington in 1985, he has overseen the Library’s collections related to the history of the North American West from 1800 to the present. Blodgett has spoken and published widely on national parks, tourism and recreation, as well as the management of manuscripts and archives. His most recent projects include “Geographies of Wonder,” two consecutive exhibitions on America’s national parks, and an edited volume, Motoring West: Volume 1 Automobile Pioneers, 1900-1909 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015).

Dr. Clay Stalls stewards The Huntington’s 20th-century California materials as well as its Hispanic collections, dating from the 15th century to the present. Before coming to The Huntington, Clay was manuscripts curator in the Department of Archives and Special Collections at Loyola Marymount University. Stalls holds the M.L.I.S. and Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Los Angeles and has had the privilege of serving as president of the Society of California Archivists. He has published in California history as well as medieval Iberian history.

Li Wei Yang has curated The Huntington’s Pacific Rim collections since 2015. Prior to that, he was an assistant curator of Western American history and institutional archivist and a project archivist at the Library. Yang completed the M.Sc. in history at the University of Edinburgh and the M.L.I.S. at San José State University. His research interests include Asian American history, migration, and East Asian rare books. In 2015, Yang curated The Huntington Library’s first exhibition on Chinese American history, “Y.C. Hong: Advocate for Chinese-American Inclusion.”

Nathan Rott is a correspondent on NPR’s National Desk, where he focuses on environment issues and the American West.

Based at NPR West in Culver City, California, Rott spends a lot of his time on the road, covering everything from breaking news stories like California’s wildfires to in-depth issues like the management of endangered species and many points between.

Rott owes his start at NPR to two extraordinary young men he never met. As the first recipient of the Stone and Holt Weeks Fellowship in 2010, he aims to honor the memory of the two brothers by carrying on their legacy of making the world a better place.

Jared Dahl Aldern is a historical ecologist and a fire practitioner, who has worked in academia, K-12 education, and tribal government. An affiliated research scholar at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, he has taught Native American history at Palomar College, San Diego State University, and Stanford University.

Theresa Gregor is a descendant of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel (Kumeyaay) as well as Yoeme (Yaqui). She is assistant professor of American Indian Studies at CSU Long Beach and earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in English at the University of Southern California. Before her tenure-track position at CSULB, she was an Adjunct Professor in the Department of American Indian Studies at CSU San Marcos and worked as the Lead Researcher for the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center. She also taught previously in the Departments of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of San Diego. Her tribal community work includes serving as the Executive Director of the Inter-Tribal Long Term Recovery Foundation, a nonprofit organization with a mission to strengthen and enhance the coordination of disaster preparedness and recovery efforts on tribal lands in Southern California. She currently serves on the Native Advisory Council at CSU San Marcos (present-2010). Recent publications include “Revising Critically Endangered Native Languages in California: Case Studies and Promising Practices” with Stan Rodriguez in On Indian Ground: California (2016) and the State of American Indian and Alaska Native Education in California Report (2016) with Dr. Joely Proudfit.

Fernanda Santos is an expert in storytelling, narrative writing and bilingual reporting.

She is a Southwest Borderlands Initiative professor of practice in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Prior to her position at ASU, Santos was the first Brazilian staff writer for the New York Times where she worked for 12 years and became the Phoenix Bureau chief.

Santos is a contributing opinion columnist at The Washington Post, a faculty member of the Poynter Institute’s Power of Diverse Voices seminar and a board member of the Arizona Latino Media Association. Additionally, she is the author of The Fire Line: The Story of Granite Mountain Hotshots which tells the story of 19 firefighters killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30, 2013.

In the classroom, Santos teaches an advanced bilingual reporting course in which ASU Cronkite students cover a range of topics in Latino communities using a combination of audio, video, text, photo and graphic elements.

Jon Wiener started out in the sixties writing for The Old Mole, an underground weekly in Cambridge, Mass. He sued the FBI for their files on John Lennon – dating from the time when Nixon had ordered Lennon deported from the US to silence him as a critic of the Vietnam War. After 17 years of litigation, including a Supreme Court appeal (Wiener v FBI, cert denied), the government settled and released almost all of pages that had been withheld on the grounds that they contained “National Security” information. That story is told in his book Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files.

He’s taught American history at UC Irvine–especially the course “Politics from FDR to Obama,” and he’s a long-time contributing editor at The Nation, where he hosts the magazine’s weekly podcast “Start Making Sense.” His guests there have included Naomi Klein, Gail Collins, Chris Hayes, Paul Krugman, Rebecca Solnit, and Barbara Ehrenreich.

Mike Davis is an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last non-fiction book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener. He is also a Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Coll Thrush is professor of history at the University of British Columbia, where he is also affiliated with UBC’s Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. He is the author of Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place and Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire.

Corinne Heyning Laverty is a research associate and fellow at the Natural History Museum, Los Angeles County, an associate of the Santa Cruz Island Foundation, and a member of the exclusive All Eight Club that tracks the people who have ever set foot on all eight Channel Islands. She has published in Western North American Naturalist, Lonely Planet, Eco Traveler, Whale Watcher,and Pacific Currents, among other publications.

Tamara Venit Shelton is associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and author of Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace and A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850–1900.

Connie Chiang is the Director of the Environmental Studies Program at Bowdoin. She studies modern United States history, with specialties in environmental history, the history of the American West, social history, and Asian American history. She is particularly interested in how shifting human interactions with and attitudes toward the natural world have transformed American society. She is the author of Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast and has published articles in many journals, including the Journal of American History and Environmental History.

Katrina Jagodinsky is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History. She is a legal historian examining marginalized peoples’ engagement with nineteenth-century legal regimes and competing jurisdictions throughout the North American West. Jagodinsky holds a Ph.D. in History (2011) and M.A. in American Indian Studies (2004) from the University of Arizona, and she earned her B.A. (2002) from Lawrence University. She spent a postdoctoral year at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies before joining the department and was the inaugural Jack & Nancy Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University in 2019.

Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and holds affiliations in the Departments of Chicana/o Studies and Feminist Studies as well as Iberian and Latin American Studies. She also currently serves as the Faculty Director of the McNair Scholars Program.

Author of Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (Tucson, 2004) and States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley, 2012), Miroslava’s most recent book, Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2018), is a history of migration, courtship, and identity as told through more than 300 personal letters exchanged across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands among family members and friends. Most recently, in 2020, the book was selected as a 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and in 2019 it won the Western Association of Women’s Historians Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award to honor the book that illustrates the use of a specific set of primary sources (such as diaries, letters, and interviews). Her essay, “Migrant Longing, Courtship, and Gendered Identity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” published by the Western History Quarterly in Summer 2016, received the 2017 Western Association of Women’s Historians Judith Lee Ridge prize and the 2017 Bolton-Cutter Award from the Western History Association for the best article on Spanish Borderlands history.

Sara Fingal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. She specializes in American culture, California history, North American environmental history, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands,
and human interactions with water resources.

Seth Archer is a cultural and environmental historian of North America with particular interest in Native American and Indigenous history to 1900. His teaching areas include early America and nineteenth-century U.S., American West, environmental history, and the history of health, disease, and medicine. From 2015 to 2017 he was the Mellon Research Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge. His first book is Sharks upon the Land: Colonialism, Indigenous Health, and Culture in Hawaiʻi, 1778–1855 (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Gary Stein is a PhD Candidate in the History program at USC. He received his BA in History from his hometown school, Queens College, a City University of New York (CUNY). He secured a Master’s (MA) degree in History from Claremont Graduate University in Southern California before coming to USC and ICW in 2016. His Master’s Thesis won the Center for Communal Studies Graduate Paper Prize in 2017, and he has presented parts of the paper at academic conferences. Specializing in Western Environmental History, Stein is currently working on his dissertation, “Outside the Box: Opposing the Grid and Its Apparatus in the American West, 1830-1990.” The project investigates intentionally independent societies across the American West. Broken into a set of discrete, but thematically and historically connected case studies, it analyzes the efforts of select groups who sought to live autonomously and self-sufficiently, rejecting the core values of the U.S. settler society, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and western American capitalism. “Outside the Box” identifies the rectilinear grid, employed to survey and distribute the western territories, as fostering this settler society, ignoring delicate ecosystems, native habitats, and existing inhabitants. The select groups posed a direct challenge to the established system and expressed or practiced these challenges through the [non-rectangular] shapes they built and spaces they inhabited. In their quest for self-sufficiency and a more direct connection with the land, they consistently encountered fierce opposition to the formation and existence of their collective experiments. “Outside the Box” seeks to uncover some of the persistent obstacles faced in the struggle for freedom and equality, and the innovative attempts to achieve this elusive American dream.

Skyler Reidy is a PhD candidate in the history department at the University of Southern California. His dissertation analyzes material religion in nineteenth-century California, and argues that settler colonialism drove secularization in the state. Skyler has also published work on the origins of Pentecostalism, and has spoken to academic and public audiences about the history of the California missions.

Alice Baumgartner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California, where she teaches courses on 19th century North America. She received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University and an M.Phil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford. Her first book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to Civil War, published in 2020, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, and the Western Historical Quarterly, among others.

David Igler is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. He began his academic career as a U.S. historian specializing in the American West and environmental history. After publishing his first book (Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920) he decided to explore the waterscape and regions west of the West: the Pacific Ocean. He is especially interested in the time period between the 1770s and the 1850s, and the geographic connections between the island Pacific, East Asia, the northern Pacific, and the western Americas. It entails a vast oceanic and peopled space, as described in his recent book The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford University Press, 2013). The book draws on hundreds of documented voyages—some painstakingly recorded by participants, some only known by archeological remains or indigenous memory—as a window into the commercial, cultural, and ecological upheavals following the initial contact period. He remains fascinated by the environmental and cultural history of the Pacific, as well as the rapidly developing fields encompassed by Pacific Studies.

Peter Westwick is a research professor in history at USC and director of ICW’s Aerospace History Project. He received his BA in physics and PhD in history from Berkeley. He is the author of Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004, which won book prizes from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Astronautical Society, and The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947-1974, which won the book prize of the Forum for the History of Science in America. He is also editor of Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California, which was selected to Best Non-Fiction of 2012 by the LA Public Library, and co-author, with Peter Neushul, of The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing, an LA Times bestseller. His most recent book is Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft. He is now working on a history of science and technology in California since the Gold Rush. In addition to overseeing archival acquisitions and oral histories for the Aerospace History Project, he contributes to ICW’s The West on Fire project.

He’s taught American history at UC Irvine–especially the course “Politics from FDR to Obama,” and he’s a long-time contributing editor at The Nation, where he hosts the magazine’s weekly podcast “Start Making Sense.” His guests there have included Naomi Klein, Gail Collins, Chris Hayes, Paul Krugman, Rebecca Solnit, and Barbara Ehrenreich.

Layne Karafantis is a postdoctoral scholar and teaching fellow at the University of Southern California, supporting the Aerospace History Project under the auspices of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. Formerly chief historian at NASA Ames and a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Layne has designed exhibits and curated collections related to aerospace history, as well as has published on topics including Cold War infrastructure and the influence of the aerospace industry on suburban development. She earned her PhD in the history of science and technology from The Johns Hopkins University.

Layne’s research interests have centered on Cold War military technologies, with a focus on aerospace-related infrastructure. Her dissertation project examined the aesthetics of command and control centers in postwar America, and included case studies on spaces such as the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command and NORAD’s Combat Operations Center in Cheyenne Mountain. Most recently, Layne has considered how technological initiatives have created and altered Western landscapes, and has also investigated the development of human factors engineering as a formalized discipline in the middle of the twentieth century.

Anne Hyde is Professor of History and Editor-in-Chief of the Western Historical Quarterly. Her most recent book, Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West, was published by W. W. Norton in 2022. She has served as President of the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA and on the elected councils of the AHA and the Western History Association. She served as Faculty Director of the AHA‘s “Tuning the History Discipline” project to help history departments assess and reform courses and curricula. Her earlier work includes Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (Ecco 2012) that won Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. At OU she serves on the Editorial Board of the University of Oklahoma Press, the Faculty Board of the Fred Jones Art Museum, and on the most recent search for a new VP and Provost.

Raquel Gutiérrez was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Tucson, Arizona where they just completed two MFAs in Poetry and Non-Fiction from the University of Arizona. Raquel is a 2017 recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Raquel also runs the tiny press, Econo Textual Objects (est. 2014), which publishes intimate works by QTPOC poets. Their poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, FENCE, Huizache, The Georgia Review, and The Texas Review. Raquel’s first book of prose, Brown Neon, will be published by Coffee House Press in the Spring of 2021.

Saretta Morganis a writer and artist. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she teaches Creative Writing at Arizona State University and contributes to the humanitarian aid efforts of No More Deaths Phoenix. She is the author of the chapbooks room for a counter interior and Feeling Upon Arrival. Currently her work addresses Black migration to the United States Southwest and its relationship to contemporary migration and border politics. Saretta holds degrees in writing from Columbia University and Pratt Institute. Most recently she has received grants and fellowships from Arizona Commission on the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is at work on Alt-Nature, her first full-length collection.

David J. Neumann earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern California as a Provost’s Fellow. His teaching interests focus on historical thinking, historical literacy, and the intersection between scholarship and pedagogy. His research interests include American religion, the Cold War, and Southern California. As Director of the History Project at CSU Long Beach from 2008 through 2016, he oversaw professional development workshops on various topics for K-12 teachers, including two NEH summer workshops. A lecturer in the History Department at CSU Long Beach for eight years, he taught American history, world history, and capstone courses in elementary and secondary education. He won several awards during more than a decade of teaching high school history.

David Torres-Rouff is an Associate Professor at University of California, Merced. His work centers on the connections between race, place, and public policy in the US West and Greater Southwest from the 18th to 20th centuries. I’m working on two projects now. One seeks to grant subjectivity to American Chinese in the 19th century, asking specifically how immigrants from China understood themselves and the world around them in terms of race and other nodes of social identity. Given the paucity of sources, I am digitizing the Los Angeles and Central Valley census records, fire insurance maps, and other sources from 1850-1900 in an effort to map American Chinese spatial practices and thereby grant them voice by analyzing their strategies for community arrangement. The second project, West of Jim Crow, considers Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. technologies of racialization and marginalization, which targeted Native, Mexican, Chinese, and African descended people (by turns). The evidence suggests that social segregation, vagrancy laws and other public policies, chain gangs, and extra legal violence in New Spain, Mexico, and then the US West laid a blueprint for Southern anti-Black Jim Crow after the Civil War.

Sarah M. A. Gualtieri is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, History, and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (2009).

Sarah M. A. Gualtieri reconstructs the early Syrian connections through California, Texas, Mexico, and Lebanon. She reveals the Syrian interests in the defense of the Mexican American teens charged in the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder, in actor Danny Thomas’s rise to prominence in LA’s Syrian cultural festivals, and in more recent activities of the grandchildren of immigrants to reclaim a sense of Arabness. Gualtieri reinscribes Syrians into Southern California history through her examination of powerful images and texts, augmented with interviews with descendants of immigrants. Telling the story of how Syrians helped forge a global Los Angeles, Arab Routes counters a long-held stereotype of Arabs as outsiders and underscores their longstanding place in American culture and in interethnic coalitions, past and present.

Nayan Shah is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California. Nayan Shah’s research examines historical struggles over bodies, space and the exercise of state power from the mid- 19th to the 21st century. His scholarship advances our understanding of comparative race and ethnic studies, LGBTQ studies, and to the history of migration, public health, law, and incarceration. Shah is the author of two award-winning books – Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (University of California Press, 2011) and Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001).

Genevieve Carpio is Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches courses in US history, suburban studies, and spatial theory.