2024 Events

Dr. Caroline Collins is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at UC Irvine and an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego where she is also affiliated with the Democracy Lab and the Indigenous Futures Institute. Her work examines public remembrances of the American West through archival methods, ethnographic study, media production, and public history exhibition. Dr. Collins is currently working with UC Press on her first book manuscript exploring the making of race and place at Old Town San Diego State Historic Park.

Dr. Genevieve Carpio is an associate professor in UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, where she teaches courses in US history, suburban studies, and spatial theory. She is the author of Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019). Professor Carpio’s current book project examines cultural exchange between California and the Pacific World through the transit of Spanish Mission architecture. An article drawn from this project, “Zorro Down Under,” earned the Western History Association’s Michael P. Malone Award for the best article on state history in North America.

Dr. Phoebe Young is Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder where she teaches cultural and environmental history of the modern US and the American West. Her first book, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (University of California Press, 2006), examined public memories of the Spanish past, the built environment, regional development, and race relations in Southern California between the 1880s and the 1930s. Her most recent book, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in America from the Civil War to Occupy (Oxford University Press, 2021), traced the hidden history of camping and the outdoors in American life that connects a familiar recreational pastime to camps for functional needs and political purposes. Camping Grounds won the 2022 Norris and Carol Hundley Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. She is also co-editor of a book series at the University of Washington Press on “The Outdoors: Recreation, Environment, and Culture.”

Matt Lassiter is a scholar of the twentieth-century United States with a research and teaching focus on political history, urban/suburban studies, racial and social inequality, and the history of policing and the carceral state. His most recent book project, The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs, is available from Princeton University Press.  He is on the steering committee of the U-M Carceral State Project and the co-PI of its Documenting Criminalization and Confinement research initiative.  He is also director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab and coordinator of the Environmental Justice HistoryLab, each of which involves undergraduate student researchers in collaborative public engagement projects. He has served on the boards of the Urban History Association, Urban History, and the Journal of Policy History and is a series editor of “Politics and Culture in Modern America,” published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Michelle Nickerson is Associate Professor at Loyola University Chicago, where teaches courses on the history of women and gender, U.S. politics, and urban America.  Nickerson’s scholarship focuses on politics and social movements from right to left.   She has published two books, the monograph Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right and a volume of essays she co-edited titled Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region.  Nickerson’s most recent book project, Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial, examines the relationship between Catholicism and radicalism in the peace movement of the Vietnam War era in the United States.  It will be published by the University of Chicago Press this coming Fall.

Becky Nicolaides is the co-coordinator of the LA History & Metro Studies group. She received her B.A. from USC in history and journalism and her Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. After serving on the faculties of Arizona State University West and UC San Diego, she became an LA-based scholar and historical consultant in 2006. Her work focuses on sub/urban history and the history of Los Angeles. She is author of The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford), My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago), and co-editor of The Suburb Reader, 2 editions (Routledge). Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Pacific Historical Review, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. She is currently a lead project member of the USC Library’s “Los Angeles County Demographic Data Project 1950-2010,” funded by the NEH, and is co-P.I. of the EU Erasmus+ transnational project “Urbanism and Suburbanization in the EU Countries and Abroad: Reflection in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts.”  She previously served as a subcommittee co-chair for Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Civic Memory working group, and on the governing council of the American Historical Association.

Regan Dunn is the Interim Assistant Deputy Director and Assistant Curator at the La Brea Tar Pits. She is a paleobotanist whose research seeks to understand the interplay between climate, plants, and animal evolution through time. She studies a variety of plant fossil types including phytoliths, pollen and macrofloras to reconstruct ancient vegetation structure and composition. She has a PhD in Biology from the University of Washington, a Master of Science in Botany from the University of Wyoming, and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Colorado State University. Before coming to the La Brea Tar Pits, Dr. Dunn worked as a paleobotanist for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the National Park Service, the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, and the Field Museum of Chicago. She has performed extensive fieldwork in South and Central America, Mexico and in the western United States. At the La Brea Tar Pits, Dr. Dunn’s research focuses on understanding vegetation change over the last 50,000 years in the Los Angeles Basin and how the fossil record informs us about future change.

Emily Lindsey is Associate Curator and Excavation Site Director at La Brea Tar Pits.  Her research uses the fossil record to understand what Ice Age animals and ecosystems were like, how climate change and human actions intersect to drive extinctions, and to predict future ecological response in the face of modern global change.  She also works across disciplines to integrate information on ecosystem response to past global changes into modern conservation planning.  Dr. Lindsey is adjunct faculty in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA and in the Department of Earth Sciences at USC, and serves on the academic board of the Institute for Field Research.  She has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Chile, Antarctica, Guyana, Ecuador, and Peru, and is the founder and director of the B.R.E.A.S.initiative, which fosters collaborative research, education, and capacity-building at tar pits around the globe.  Dr. Lindsey studied at Brown University, the University of California – Berkeley, and as a Fulbright scholar at the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Uruguay, before joining the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County in 2016.

Cindi Alvitre (Gabrieleno Tongva) is a Professor in the American Indian Studies department at California StateUniversity Long Beach.  She is a Gabrieleno-Tongva Indian, and has been a tribal leader since the age of 29. She is a doctoral student at University of California, Los Angeles. Ms. Alvitre’s passion is the revitalization of Southern California Indian basketry, and its healing qualities.

Marne Campbell is Associate Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University.

Doug Flamming is Associate Professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning teacher, Douglas Flamming specializes in the social and political history of the United States since the Civil War.  He is the author of three books, including Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America(University of California Press, 2005), and African Americans in the West (ABC-CLIO, 2009).  He is currently completing a study of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Laura Dominguez is a historian of race, heritage, and placekeeping in the American West. She is currently a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Park Service and an affiliated scholar with the ICW. An expert in historic preservation, her research and public practices explore equitable storytelling in the built environment and surrounding landscapes.

Kristina Borrman is the Assistant Professor of Built-Environment History at the School of Design and Construction at Washington State University. She is currently writing about the role of Black patronage in Williams’s design of the Golden State Mutual Insurance Company in West Adams, where the company encouraged policyholders to imagine themselves as architecture patrons and to picture the modernist office building as a symbol of racial uplift.

WELCOME

William Deverell, USC Divisional Dean for the Social Sciences and Co-Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California & the West

INTRODUCTION

Christian Grose, USC Schwarzenegger Institute

SPEAKERS

Jason Sexton, UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability

Cid Martinez, University of San Diego

Megan Kendrick, Pepperdine University

Manuel Pastor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity and Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change

Karin Huebner, USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study

Brie Loskota, Former Director, USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture

Julia Wick, Los Angeles Times