2021 Events

Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer, with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. Her most recent book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Scribner 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History. Scribner will publish her next book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America, in March 2022.

Stephen J. Pyne is a fire historian, urban farmer, and emeritus professor at Arizona State University. In a former life, he spent 15 seasons with the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park. Among his recent fire books is Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America.

Phoebe S. K. Young is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she focuses on the cultural and environmental history of the modern United States and the American West. Young received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College and her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. Her first book, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (University of California Press, 2006, published under her previous name of Phoebe S. Kropp), examines public memories of the Spanish past, the built environment, regional development, and race relations in Southern California between the 1880s and the 1930s. Her second book, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in America from the Civil War to Occupy (Oxford University Press, 2021), traces 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. Elements of this project appeared in the Journal of Social History (Fall 2009), and Cities in Nature: Urban Environments of the American West, ed. Char Miller (2010). She is also the co-editor of an anthology entitled Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics (with Marguerite S. Shaffer, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), which includes a co-authored essay on “The Nature-Culture Paradox” and an examination of the Occupy Wall Street movement. She has received multiple awards and grants, including fellowships from the Henry E. Huntington Library, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Professor Young seeks to support student learning at all levels and to advance the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in History. At CU Boulder, she has received the Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Distinction in Teaching and Pedagogy and the Award for Teaching with Technology in Arts & Sciences.

Josh Sides is the Whitsett Professor of California History at CSU Northridge in Los Angeles. He is the author of several books including, most recently, Backcountry Ghosts: California Homesteaders and the Making of a Dubious Dream.

Anthony Allman served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, he attended UCLA and became a strong advocate for veterans’ causes. He helped established the Military Veterans Organization at UCLA, led an effort to give veterans priority enrollment, increased access to additional student services such as the Academic Advancement Program and spearheaded the creation of a Veterans Resource Office on campus. He also facilitated the introduction of the annual Entrepreneurship Boot Camp or Veterans with Disabilities at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. In this interview, Allman shares with us the history, inspiration, and future of his advocacy efforts.

Marissa López is Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA, researching Chicanx literature from the 19th century to the present with an emphasis on 19th century Mexican California. She has written two books: Chicano Nations (NYU 2011) is about nationalism and Chicanx literature from the early-1800s to post-9/11; Racial Immanence (NYU 2019) explores uses of the body and affect in Chicanx cultural production. She just completed a year-long residency at the Los Angeles Public Library as a Scholars & Society fellow with the ACLS where she worked to collaboratively develop a mobile app, “Picturing Mexican America,” that uses geodata to display images of Mexican California relevant to a user’s location.

Sandra Rebok’s research focuses on exploration voyages, intellectual networks and transnational collaborations during the 19th century. She has over 20 years of experience in Humboldtian scholarship, she is the author of several books on Humboldt and the editor of three of his works in Spanish. One of her recent books examines his intellectual exchange with Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson and Humboldt, 2014), while her forthcoming monograph, Humboldt’s Empire of Knowledge, analyzes Humboldt’s position between the Spanish Empire in decline and the expanding United States.’s research focuses on exploration voyages, intellectual networks and transnational collaborations during the 19th century. She has over 20 years of experience in Humboldtian scholarship, she is the author of several books on Humboldt and the editor of three of his works in Spanish. One of her recent books examines his intellectual exchange with Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson and Humboldt, 2014), while her forthcoming monograph, Humboldt’s Empire of Knowledge, analyzes Humboldt’s position between the Spanish Empire in decline and the expanding United States.

Dr. Sarah Keyes is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. She specializes in the 19th century U.S. and the history of the U.S. West with a focus on the environment, gender, and intercultural interactions between Indigenous peoples and Euro-Americans. Her current work explores these topics along the overland trails to Oregon and California in the mid-19th century.

Henry Knight Lozano is a Senior Lecturer of American History at The University of Exeter. His work explores questions of U.S. expansion, place promotion, and race, climate, and environment, with a particular focus on the United States’ tropical and semi-tropical frontiers – California, Florida, and Hawai’i.

Eloise Gómez Reyes is the Assembly Majority Leader. In 2016, Reyes was sworn in as a California State Assemblymember for the 47th Assembly District. She is the Chair of the Assembly Human Services Committee and also serves on the Aging and Long-Term Care Committee, Budget Committee, Judiciary Committee, Utilities and Energy Committee and Legislative Ethics Committee. In her first two terms Reyes championed bills and issues that increase equity and inclusion in vulnerable communities throughout the state. These efforts include AB 2147 which lead a national conversation on second chances for inmate firefighters giving them a pathway to expunge their records and pursue a career in firefighting. Eloise, a proud daughter of immigrants, has been a champion for her community throughout her career. Reyes graduated from Colton High School and received her A.A. from San Bernardino Valley College. She received her Bachelors of Science degree at the University of Southern California and then Reyes went on to earn her law degree from Loyola Law School.

Esteban Núñez is the Director of Advocacy and Community Organizing, Anti-Recidivism Coalition. As the son of a local activist and union organizer, Núñez was first introduced to civic engagement and activism at an early age. He served six years of confinement in California, yet used this time to think deeply, explore his past, and pursue a direction of greater purpose. Having thought long and hard about the ways in which his actions had impacted others, Nuñez works to change the misconceptions and negative stigmas associated with criminality as Director of State Advocacy for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition.

Edward Lopez is a firefighter at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Theresa Salazar has been the Curator of The Bancroft Collection, Western Americana since July of 1999. In 2004, she took on the responsibility for the Latin Americana collections of The Bancroft Library and oversaw that collection for twelve years. She is responsible for acquisitions related to Western Americana, from the colonial period to the present. She regularly teaches students about conducting research in The Bancroft Library.

Karlos K. Hill is an associate professor and chair of the Clara Luper Department of African and African-American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. He is a community-engaged scholar and historian of the history of lynching, racial violence, and their legacies in the black experience. Hill has helped create an infrastructure to help provide high-level training on teaching the Tulsa Race Massacre through the annual Tulsa Race Massacre Oklahoma Teachers Summer Institute. Several hundred Oklahoma educators have participated in the summer institute, impacting thousands of middle school and high school students. The next institute, coinciding with the centennial of the massacre, will be expanded to a full two-week professional development period, as well as a statewide Oklahoma Educator Institute offered in spring 2021.

George J. Sanchez, professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History, has served as Director of USC Dornsife Diversity since April 2008. He is responsible for ensuring that the USC Dornsife fundamental commitment to the benefits of a diverse USC Dornsife community is effectively translated into best practices in areas such as faculty recruitment and retention, graduate student programs, and undergraduate research experiences and advancement. He works with all College departments to address what the commitment to diversity means in various disciplinary settings. To ensure USC Dornsife efforts have an impact beyond the immediate community, he works with a variety of national organizations and foundations on the development of special programs and research agendas.

Julia Brown-Bernstein is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the department of History. Julia’s research examines the relationship between neoliberalism, citizenship, and belonging in the post-World War II era. Her dissertation is a history of the central San Fernando Valley as it underwent demographic shifts and economic restructuring from the 1970s to the early 2000s. It examines how immigrants not only made the region a transnational crossroads, linking communities from the Southern Cone to South Korea, but also how they shaped US political life and culture. Her work sheds light on how neoliberal policies of the latter twentieth century altered who belongs and what it means to be a citizen in a privatizing world.

Julia’s article, “Under the Canopy: Finding Belonging at the San Fernando Swap Meet, 1976-2019” was published in the Journal of American Ethnic History fall 2021.

Before pursuing her PhD, Julia was a public school teacher in the San Fernando Valley. She holds an M.Ed. from UCLA and a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College.

Cassandra Flores-Montano is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies and Ethnicities program.

Kathy Pulupa is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies and Ethnicities program.

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.

Kevin Waite, assistant professor of history at Durham University, is the author of West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. He’s currently writing a history of the life and times of Biddy Mason, a Georgia slave turned California real estate entrepreneur. Funded by a four-year Collaborative Research Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Waite and Sarah Barringer Gordon’s (UPenn) project website is www.biddymasoncollaborative.com.

Alice Baumgartner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. Her first book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to Civil War, was named a 2020 New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Andrés Reséndez is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis. His forthcoming book, Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, focuses on the “Columbian moment” in the Pacific, beginning with the first expedition that went from America to Asia and back (1564-1565), thus transforming the Pacific into a vital space of contact and exchange.

Marie-Pierre Ulloa is a lecturer in the Comparative Literature, and in the French and Italian Department, teaching French and Francophone cultural and intellectual history, with a focus on France and North Africa. She is a faculty affiliate of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Mediterranean Studies Forum, The Europe Center, and the Ehess in Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales).

Marie-Pierre is the author of two books: Francis Jeanson, a Dissident Intellectual from the French Resistance to the Algerian War (Stanford University Press, 2008, also published in French and Arabic), and Le Nouveau Rêve Américain : Du Maghreb à la Californie (The New American Dream: From North Africa to California, CNRS editions, 2019).

She is the co-founder of the Stanford Global Studies Summer Festival (2008) and the founder of the undergraduate short story contest (2014) sponsored by the Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

William Deverell is professor of history and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West at the University of Southern California. He is the author of numerous studies of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West, including Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Woody Guthrie L.A.: 1937 to 1941.

Patt Morrison is a longtime Los Angeles Times writer, columnist and podcaster who has a share of two Pulitzer Prizes. Her broadcasting work has won six Emmys and twelve Golden Mike awards. Both of her nonfiction books have been bestsellers: Rio LA, her book about the Los Angeles River, and Don’t Stop the Presses! Truth, Justice and the American Newspaper. She the first woman in nearly twenty-five years to be honored with the L.A. Press Club’s lifetime achievement award. Pink’s, the legendary Hollywood hot dog stand, named its veggie dog after her.

Sherry L. Smith grew up in Northwest Indiana, a place tucked between Chicago’s cultural treasures and the natural wonders of the Indiana Dunes. Yet, the American West won her over as a subject of historical study and place to live.

After undergraduate education at Purdue University, Smith moved to Seattle, enrolled in the University of Washington for her Ph.d., and has resided west of the Mississippi River ever since.  She is University Distinguished Professor of History (Emerita) at Southern Methodist University.  Her award-winning books include Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power and Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940, both published by Oxford University Press. Smith is a former president of the Western History Association and received the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellowship at the Huntington Library, which supported research for Bohemians West. She has also been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and Yale University.