2023 Events

Josh Garrett-Davis is the H. Russell Smith Curator of Western American History at the Huntington Library. For nearly 8 years, he served as the Gamble Curator of Western History, Popular Culture, and Firearms at the Autry Museum of the American West, where he led the NEH-funded renovation of the long-term exhibition Imagined Wests. He is the author of What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination (2019) and numerous other publications for both academic and general audiences.

Anthony Macías is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside and author of the books Mexican American Mojo and Chicano-Chicana Americana: Pop Culture Pluralism.   He has published in many academic journals and has peer reviewed article manuscripts for several, including The Western Historical Quarterly and The Western Journal of Black Studies. At the Autry Museum he presented for the Works in Progress workshop series and introduced three public movie screenings for the “What is a Western?” film series.

California State University Channel Islands Prof. Julia Ornelas-Higdon specializes in the history of California and the West. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, agricultural and labor histories. 

Dr. Bill Deverell is a historian of the U.S. West, Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Co-Director of the Huntington-USC Institute of California and the West.

University of Nevada, Reno Prof. Sarah Keyes specializes in the 19th century and the history of the U.S. West with a focus on the environment and intercultural interactions between Indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans. 

Dr. Peter Blodgett is a historian of the U.S. West and recently retired from his role as H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts at The Huntington Library.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. She’s the author of Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment.

Jordan Keagle is a historian of environment, culture, and consumerism in the United States. He completed a dissertation entitled “Freezing Civilities: Ice and the Building of the American West, 1850-1950” at the University of Southern California.

Mark Padoongpatt (he/him) is associate professor of Asian American Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California in 2011. He researches and writes on the histories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the 20th-century United States, with a focus on empire, migration, race, and urban and suburban cultures. His book, Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America (University of California Press, 2017), explores how and why Thai food shaped the contours of Thai American community and identity since World War II. He’s currently writing a book and developing a podcast series on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Las Vegas titled “Neon Pacific,” which explores histories of race, space, and placemaking in Vegas.

Dr. 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.

Dr. Chelene Hanes is a Scientist with the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) specializing in wildland fire. Her most recent research is focused on improving our understanding of drought in fire danger rating, through field studies and remote sensing applications. She is a member of the CFS Fire Danger Group who are responsible for the development of the Next Generation – Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System. Dr. Hanes lives in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario with her husband and two girls.

Wade Graham is a historian, journalist, and landscape designer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to our Back Yards, What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are, a cultural history of gardens in America (HarperCollins, 2011), Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World, a global history of visionary urbanism (HarperCollins, 2016), and Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii, an environmental history of Hawaii (University of California Press, 2018) ), and the upcoming Southland: An Atlas and Almanac of Los Angeles County (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2024). He writes a monthly environment column for the UK magazine Perspective, and has written on the environment, landscape, urbanism, and the arts for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, Outside and other publications. 

He has a Ph.D in American history. He taught urbanism and environmental policy at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, for 11 years. Since 1999, he has been a trustee of Glen Canyon Institute, a Colorado River restoration group based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Ron Durbin is the current Forestry Division Chief with over 25 years in the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

He is a Registered Professional Forester (RPF) and holds three Masters degrees in landscape architecture, business administration, and management and leadership.

He has served on the LA County Regional Planning Environmental Review Board for over 12 years and currently co-chairs the Santa Monica Mountains Fire Safe Alliance with the Third District Board of Supervisors Field Deputy: the SMMFSA is a coordinating group of local agencies focused on providing resources and education to ensure environmentally sensitive defensible-space implementation.

Drew Smith is a 34-year veteran of the fire service, currently serving as the Assistant Chief for Division VII of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. A second-generation firefighter, he began his career with the Los Angeles County hand crews in 1988.

Before being promoted to Assistant Chief, he has filled the positions of Firefighter, Paramedic, Engineer, Captain, Superintendent and Battalion Chief. His collateral duty assignments include overseeing hand crew operations, prescribed fire/fuel modification and risk assessment. He also shares responsibility with the Ventura County Fire Department and the USFS Angeles National Forest in conducting fire behavior research, risk analysis, and safety.

Chief Smith is a qualified Fire Behavior Analyst (FBAN), Operations Section Chief (OPSC), and RX Fire Boss (RXB1). He has also been an instructor at the National Advanced Fire and Resource Institute (NAFRI) since 2004. He has significant experience in both initial attack and extended attack incidents and has been assigned to an Interagency Incident Management Team since 2000. He is a lifelong resident of Newbury Park.

Anne Hyde is Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and Editor-in-Chief of the Western Historical Quarterly. This year she is serving as the Roger’s Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century History at the Huntington Library.  Her most recent book, Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West, was published in 2022. She has served as President of the Pacific Coast Branch of the AHA and is now the elected Vice-President of the Professional Division of the AHA. 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 (2012) that won Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Alicia Gutierrez-Romine is currently an associate professor of history at La Sierra University. Her book, From Back Alley to the Border: Criminal Abortion in California, 1920–1969 (2020), explores the history of criminal abortion and abortion legislation in California before Roe v. Wade. In addition to From Back Alley to the Border, Gutierrez-Romine’s work was published in Beyond the Border of the Law: Critical Legal Histories of the North American West (2018). She has previously received the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Grant and has been featured on C-SPAN and the Science Channel. Her current project explores intersections of race and professional medicine in Southern California and the borderlands.

Drew Smith is a 34-year veteran of the fire service, currently serving as the Assistant Chief for Division VII of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. A second-generation firefighter, he began his career with the Los Angeles County hand crews in 1988.

Before being promoted to Assistant Chief, he has filled the positions of Firefighter, Paramedic, Engineer, Captain, Superintendent and Battalion Chief. His collateral duty assignments include overseeing hand crew operations, prescribed fire/fuel modification and risk assessment. He also shares responsibility with the Ventura County Fire Department and the USFS Angeles National Forest in conducting fire behavior research, risk analysis, and safety.

Chief Smith is a qualified Fire Behavior Analyst (FBAN), Operations Section Chief (OPSC), and RX Fire Boss (RXB1). He has also been an instructor at the National Advanced Fire and Resource Institute (NAFRI) since 2004. He has significant experience in both initial attack and extended attack incidents and has been assigned to an Interagency Incident Management Team since 2000. He is a lifelong resident of Newbury Park.

Ron Durbin is the current Forestry Division Chief with over 25 years in the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

He is a Registered Professional Forester (RPF) and holds three Masters degrees in landscape architecture, business administration, and management and leadership.

He has served on the LA County Regional Planning Environmental Review Board for over 12 years and currently co-chairs the Santa Monica Mountains Fire Safe Alliance with the Third District Board of Supervisors Field Deputy: the SMMFSA is a coordinating group of local agencies focused on providing resources and education to ensure environmentally sensitive defensible-space implementation.

Wade Graham is a historian, journalist, and landscape designer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to our Back Yards, What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are, a cultural history of gardens in America (HarperCollins, 2011), Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World, a global history of visionary urbanism (HarperCollins, 2016), and Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii, an environmental history of Hawaii (University of California Press, 2018) ), and the upcoming Southland: An Atlas and Almanac of Los Angeles County (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2024). He writes a monthly environment column for the UK magazine Perspective, and has written on the environment, landscape, urbanism, and the arts for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, Outside and other publications. 

He has a Ph.D in American history. He taught urbanism and environmental policy at the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, for 11 years. Since 1999, he has been a trustee of Glen Canyon Institute, a Colorado River restoration group based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Mike Amezcua is an Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University and the author of Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is an expert in 20th century US History, Latinx history, and urban history. He has written for broad audiences in The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Teen Vogue, and Public Books. Professor Amezcua serves as a member of the scholars’ council for the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute and was named a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and earned his BA at UCLA and PhD at Yale.

Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her research explores the intertwined histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of the award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940. Her most recent book is A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, on immigrant workers as placemakers —including her grandmother—who nurtured and fed the community through the restaurants they established, which served as urban anchors. She co-edited Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice, and is now at work on a new book, The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington: A History of Its Mexican Workers. In addition to publishing widely in scholarly journals, she has also written for the LA Times, Washington Post, San Diego Union-Tribune, and more. Professor Molina is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow.

Yu Tokunaga received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California in 2018 and is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies with a joint appointment at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University.

Dr. Genevieve Carpio is Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she works on questions related to relational racial formation, the urban humanities, and 20th century U.S. history. She holds a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity, a Masters in Urban Planning, and a graduate certificate in Historic Preservation. She has published in American Quarterly, Journal of American History, Journal of Urban Affairs, and Information, Communication and Society, among other venues. Carpio is author of Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019), which received the Owen’s book award from the Western Historical Association and was a finalist for the National Association of Chicano and Chicana Studies book prize.

Andrea Geiger is professor emerita of history at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, and the author of Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885-1928 (Yale University Press, 2011), awarded both the Theodore Saloutos Book Award (Immigration and Ethnic History Society) and the Association of Asian American Studies History Book Award. Her most recent book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867-1945, was co-published in 2022 by the University of North Carolina Press (David J. Webber Series in the New Borderlands History) and, in Canada, by UBC Press. 

Moon-Ho Jung is Professor of History and the Harry Bridges Chair in Labor Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State (2022) and Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (2006).

Sean Fraga is an assistant professor (teaching) of Environmental Studies and History at the University of Southern California. He is an environmental historian of the North American West and eastern Pacific Ocean during the long nineteenth century, specializing in connections between U.S. imperial expansion, Native sovereignty, technology, and the environment. His book project, Ocean Fever: Steam Power, Transpacific Trade, and American Colonization of Puget Sound, is under contract with Yale University Press for publication in the Lamar Series in Western History. Before joining U.S.C.’s faculty, he was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in U.S.C.’s Humanities in a Digital World program.

Amanda Hendrix-Komoto is an Assistant Professor of History at Montana State University. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan, and is the author of Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific (University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Andrés Reséndez is a professor of history and author who grew up in Mexico City and currently teaches at the University of California at Davis. His specialties are early European exploration and colonization of the Americas, the U.S-Mexico border region, and the early history of the Pacific Ocean. His previous book, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award and winner of the 2017 Bancroft Prize from Columbia University. His latest book, Conquering the Pacific (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), is about the first expedition to go from America to Asia and back, thus transforming the Pacific Ocean into a vital space of contact and exchange.

Bryant Simon is the Laura H. Carnell professor of history at Temple University. In addition to his most recent book, The Hamlet Fire: The Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Labor, and Cheap Lives, he is the author of three other books, three edited collections, including Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (co-edited with Jane Dailey and Glenda Gilmore), and dozens of essays. Over the course of his career, he has explored topics ranging from labor and politics in the New Deal South to race rumors during World War II to geographies of sexuality to the history of Atlantic City and why we (or don’t go) to Starbucks. Simon is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Speaker, an elected member of the Society of American Historians, and the past President of the Southern Labor Studies Association. Last year, he was honored with the Great Teacher Award at Temple. He is currently writing a history of the public bathroom in the United States.

Evan Madden has been involved in the manufacture and sales of the Portland Loo restroom with his business Madden Fabrication since 2013. Madden Fabrication has been coordinating and planning the Portland Loo restroom with the City of Portland, Oregon since 2007. Working with municipalities all over the US and Canada the Portland Loo has spread to over 180 locations throughout the United States, Canada and one location in New Zealand.

Kerry Morrison served for 22 years as one of the leaders in the economic revitalization success story in Hollywood where nearly $5B in investment transformed this key neighborhood in Los Angeles. Her skills at coalition building and community outreach are evident in the expansion and multiple successful renewals of the District by the assessed property owners. She led the Hollywood Entertainment District business improvement district (BID), from its inception as a six-block $600,000 district in 1996 to the expansion and renewal of the BID in 2019 into a $7M organization encompassing hundreds of property owners and incorporating the main thoroughfares of Sunset and Hollywood Blvd.  

As a Stanton Fellow, searching for a better way to help the most severely mentally ill people left to languish on our streets, in 2017 Morrison found her way to Trieste, Italy, a city recognized by the WHO  as a model system. Feeling called into a new chapter of her career, inspired by what she witnessed in Trieste, left the BID in early 2019.  

Kerry founded Heart Forward LA, a nonprofit whose mission involves “transforming the American mental health system through radical hospitality.” Morrison has been working within supportive housing and board & care communities to introduce radical hospitality, with an emphasis on building community and creating pathways to purposeful engagement. She has also been engaged as a volunteer with inmates, struggling with serious mental illness, in the FIP Step Down Unit at LA County Twin Towers Correctional Facility.

Morrison is active in homeless policy LA. She has served on the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), the HHH Citizen’s Oversight Committee, the founding board for Hollywood 4WRD,  and the The Center in Hollywood. Heart Forward is collaborating with Hollywood 4WRD and Fountain House in NYC to stand up the first mental health clubhouse in Hollywood in the coming year. She also hosts a podcast on topics related to the American mental health system juxtaposed with the human-centered kindness found in Trieste, called Heart Forward:  Conversations from the Heart. 

Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is currently serving as Interim Director of Research at the Huntington, temporarily stepping down from its Board of Governors while a search for a new director is underway. Her own research explores the intertwined histories of race, place, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of the award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America:  Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940. Her most recent book is A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community, on immigrant workers as placemakers —including her grandmother—who nurtured and fed the community through the restaurants they established, which served as urban anchors. She co- edited Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice, and is now at work on a new book, The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington: A History of Its Mexican Workers. In addition to publishing widely in scholarly journals, she has also written for the LA Times, Washington Post, San Diego Union-Tribune, and more. Professor Molina is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow.