2025 Events

Dr. Cori Tucker-Price is an Assistant Professor of the African American Religious Experience and Benjamin Banneker Faculty Fellow at UC Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching focus on nineteenth and twentieth century African American religious history, religion and the U.S. West, religion and media, digital humanities, and migration studies. She is currently an ACLS Fellow completing her first book project, Righteous Citizens: A History of Race and Religion in Los Angeles, 1903-1953, which traces the historical and social forces that shaped African American religious institutions in southern California. Her work has been supported by various funding bodies, including the Huntington Library, and has appeared in the Pacific Historical Review, The Los Angeles Times, and the Crossroads Project at Princeton University. Prior to her appointment at UCSB, she held postdoctoral fellowships at USC and Dartmouth College.

Dr. Will Schultz is an assistant professor of American religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His work focuses on the intersection of religion, politics, and economics in the modern United States.

Dr. Jared Farmer is the Walter H. Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Chair of the Department of History. Farmer’s temporal expertise is the long nineteenth century; his regional expertise is the North American West. He is the author of five books, including Trees in Paradise: A California History (2013). His recent work has turned to climate history, energy history, science and technology studies, and media studies. Originally from Utah, Farmer earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University and began his academic career as a postdoctoral fellow with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

Dr. Claire Hoffman works as a journalist and author, reporting for national magazines, covering culture, religion, celebrity, business and whatever else seems interesting. She was formerly a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone. She is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz, and has a masters degree in religion from the University of Chicago, a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University and an MFA from NYU. She serves on the board of her family foundation, the Goldhirsh Foundation, as well as the Columbia Journalism School and ProPublica.

Dr. Bradley Onishi is President of the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement and the Founder of Axis Mundi Media. In 2023 he published, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – And What Comes Next, which was chosen by the “Christian Science Monitor” as a Best Read for 2023. He is also faculty in Religion and Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. A TEDx speaker, he has written for the New York Times, NBC News, Rolling Stone, Huffpost, Religion & Politics, The LA Review of Books, The Conversation US, Rewire.News, among other outlets. Onishi appears regularly on NPR-affiliate programs and nationally ranked podcasts. His first monograph, The Sacrality of the Secular, appeared from Columbia University Press in 2018; his scholarship has been published in journals such as JAAR, Sophia, Religions, and The American Book Review. He is the co-host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, a religion and politics show, which has been downloaded over ten million times since 2018.

Anne Soon Choi, author of L.A. Coroner: Thomas Noguchi and Death in Hollywood (Third State Books), is a historian and professor of Asian American Studies and university administrator at California State University, Northridge. Her essay “The Japanese American Citizens League, Los Angeles Politics, and the Thomas Noguchi Case,” on which this book is based, won the 2021 Francis Wheat Prize from the Historical Society of Southern California. Choi has previously served on the faculty of Swarthmore College and the University of Kansas and is an Andrew Mellon Fellow and an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Ethnic Studies Fellow. She lives and writes in Los Angeles, California.

Alice Baumgartner is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern California. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and an M.Phil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Her first book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to Civil War, was selected as an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review and as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in History.

Katrina Jagodinsky is Associate Professor of History at University of Nebraska Lincoln and founder of the Digital Legal Research Lab, a hub for critical legal research applying digital tools to chronicle and measure marginalized people’s use of the law in the United States. Dr. Jagodinsky recently launched Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West, 1812-1924, a database of legal cases featuring the efforts of petitioners to challenge their wrongful confinement and coercive detention:  https://petitioningforfreedom.unl.edu/

Julian Lim is the Arthur Eisenberg and Susan Engel Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Lim’s work explores connections between Asian, Latinx, African American, and Indigenous histories and how laws shape notions of belonging within the U.S. and across national boundaries. Lim’s first book, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, examined the history of diverse immigrants in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the development of immigration policy and law on both sides of the border.

James Tejani is associate professor at California State University in San Luis Obispo.  After growing up in Long Beach, he studied at the University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University.  His writings have appeared in Western Historical Quarterly, Southern California Quarterly, Dispatches Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times. His debut book A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth was published by W. W. Norton in July 2024.

Eric Avila is a professor in the History, Chicana/o Studies, and Urban Planning departments at UCLA. He is a twentieth-century U.S. urban historian and the author of three books: Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2004), The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), and American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018). Over the years, he has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in History at the University of California Berkeley. His current book project is on the cultural history of late twentieth-century Los Angeles, titled On the Verge: Los Angeles Between Watts and Rodney King.

James D. Newland is a historian, project manager, and planner for the California State Parks Department.   He is currently serving as the Division Chief for the Strategic Planning & Recreation Services Division of California State Parks, where he has been employed for over 28 years. He has been professionally involved in cultural resources, land use planning, community history and historic preservation since 1991.   With State Parks, Jim has served as historian and project manager for the initial planning efforts at Los Angeles State Historic Park (LASHP) as well as leading preservation projects at Will Rogers State Historic Park, Pio Pico State Historic Park, Malibu Lagoon State Beach, Los Encinos State Historic Park, Topanga State Park and Crystal Cove State Park.

Sissy Trinh is the founder and Executive Director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance (SEACA) in Los Angeles. SEACA engages in innovative organizing with youth on land use policy and equitable development campaigns and a new wave of gentrification slated for Chinatown that was proceeding with no meaningful input from residents. Under SEACA’s mentorship, the youth learn about how decisions are made within City Hall and how abstract concepts such as zoning impact rent, racial justice, and their community’s overall quality of life in order for them to become powerful advocates to advance a comprehensive vision of social, economic and racial justice.

Alissa Walker is a writer based in Los Angeles where she has covered transportation, housing, urban design, public space, and environmental policy for two decades. She edits the newsletter Torched, which tracks the legacy improvements that LA is making for its megaevent era, including the 2026 World Cup, 2027 Super Bowl, and the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. Alissa is the 2021 recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary for her writing on design and urbanism, and played herself on the traffic safety episode of Adam Conover’s show Adam Ruins Everything, “Adam Ruins a Murder.” She lives in L.A.’s Historic Filipinotown neighborhood, where she is the co-host of LA Podcast, an avid ice cream consumer, and a mom to the city’s two most enthusiastic public transit riders.

Jennifer Carr is a writer from San Pedro, California, and is a USC alumna (class of 2001). Her fiction and nonfiction grapple with what life in a globalized, automated world means for union towns like San Pedro, where immigrant families have come to live and work and stay for generations. Aside from her essay in Writing the Golden State, Jennifer’s work has appeared in Zócalo Public Square, Boom California, and Baltimore Review, among others. She teaches creative writing at Chapman University.

Wendy Cheng is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California. She is the author of Island X: Taiwanese Students, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023) and The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012). Her creative nonfiction essays have been published in the Cincinnati Review, Boom: A Journal of California, Zócalo Public Square, and Los Angeles Review of Books, and have been nominated for the University of Iowa Krause Essay Prize and the Pushcart Prize, as well as selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays and for inclusion in the Best Spiritual Literature anthology. 

Romeo Guzmán is a historian, editor, and cultural worker from the San Gabriel Valley. He is the co-director of the South El Monte Arts Posse and ran C.A.S.A Zamora from 2023-24. From 2019 to 2022, he co-edited Boom California; he is currently an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square. You can find his writing in the Journal of American History, Journal of American Ethnic History, The History of the Family, KCET, Tropics of Meta, and Air/Light. He co-edited Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California (Angel City Press: 2024) and East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (Rutgers, 2020). Guzmán is currently as assistant professor at Claremont Graduate University.

David Helps is an urban historian and writer from Southwestern Ontario, Canada and the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe peoples. His research has been published in the Journal of Urban History and American Quarterly and his essays and reportage have appeared in The Nation, Public Books, and the LA Review of Books, among other places. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, he is writing his first book: a people’s history of global Los Angeles.

David Ulin is Professor of the Practice of English, and editor of the journal Air/Light. He is the author or editor of nearly 20 books, including the novel Thirteen Question Method; Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and The New York Times; his essay “Bed” was selected for The Best American Essays 2020. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Ucross Foundation, as well as a COLA-IMAP Master Artist Grant from the City of Los Angeles. Currently the books editor at Alta Journal, he has also edited Didion: The 1960s and 70s, Didion: The 1980s and 90s, and Didion: Memoirs and Later Writings for Library of America.