2022 Events

Sergiy Zibtsev is a Professor at the Department of Silviculture of the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine and Head of the Regional Eastern Europe Fire Monitoring Center (REEFMC) based in Kyiv.  REEFMC is associated to the Global Fire Monitoring Center (GFMC) and has been worked with international organization (UNEP, GEF, OSCE) and EU on developing and implementation of holistic approach to research based Integrated Landscape Fire Management, including such a crisis regions like Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and recently  – zone of armed conflict. The mission of the REEFMC is to provide advisory support to the region and Ukrainian authorities, international organizations towards developing policies and capacities in Integrated Landscape Fire Management.

Robert English is the Associate Professor of International Relations, Slavic Languages and Literature and Environment Studies. He is an American academic, author, historian, and international relations scholar who specializes in the history and politics of contemporary Eastern Europe, the former USSR, and Russia, with a focus ranging from general issues of regional relations to specific questions of ethnicity, identity, and nationalism. He formerly worked as a policy analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense and the Committee for National Security.

Jameson Karns is a former firefighter whose research focuses on international wildfire management. He serves as the ICW’s “West on Fire” Assistant Research Director.

Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, emeritus at Stanford University.  He has written widely on the American West, the Gilded Age, environmental history, the history of capitalism, and Native America.

Cedd Moses is the Chief Vision Officer and Founder of Pouring with Heart, a hospitality company that operates 26 bars, historic restaurants, and beer halls in Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, and Denver. Moses and his company have garnered national recognition for their part in the revitalization of Downtown LA since 2002. Moses and ‘Pouring with Heart’ (formerly 213 Hospitality) are pursuing the auspicious goal of building 2030 careers in the bar business by 2030.  Moses’s successful book “Pouring With Heart, the essential magic behind the bartenders we love” was published in 2021. All the profits of this book go directly to “For Each Other Fund”, a charity which supports hundreds of their bar staff to help see them through problems affecting them and/or their families. Cedd Moses is the son of famous Abstract Expressionist painter Ed Moses and was raised in Venice California’s renowned art scene. Moses is on the Board of the Los Angeles Chapter of the US Bartenders Guild, the Museum of the American Cocktail, the National Food and Beverage Foundation and the Los Angeles Tourism Board.

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.

Margaret J. Vick has more than 30 years of experience working with and advising Native American Tribes and tribal organizations in the Western United States. Dr. Vick has also advised foreign governments through USAID and United Nations programs. She has a doctorate of juridical sciences in the law of international water resources from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law and works with all levels of government on complex water allocation and management issues. She specializes in cross-jurisdictional negotiations and brings a wide range of expertise and a broad perspective to issues of water use and governance. She is a frequent speaker on Colorado River issues and is an adjunct professor at McGeorge School of Law teaching the law of international water resources in their Masters in Science and Law program.

Jeffrey Kightlinger is currently serving as the interim general manager of Pasadena Water and Power, which provides safe and reliable water and power to approximately 150,000 residents in the City of Pasadena. Mr. Kightlinger oversees a department of 440 full-time employees with an annual budget of $272 million. Prior to joining Pasadena in 2022, Mr. Kightlinger was the chief executive officer of The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) from 2006 to 2021, and was the longest-serving CEO in the history of the agency. As CEO, he oversaw MWD’s $1.8 billion annual budget and 1,800 employees. He was also responsible for MWD’s daily water and power operations, and negotiated strategic agreements on the Colorado River, the 50-year renewal of Hoover Dam hydroelectric power, and on the operations of the State Water Project. Before becoming CEO, Mr. Kightlinger was MWD’s chief legal officer and a known expert on water law and the law of the Colorado River.

Miriam Pawel is a journalist, author and independent scholar who has written extensively about California history, politics, and agriculture, including three books – The Union of Their Dreams, Power Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement; The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography; and The Browns of California – The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation.

Melissa Montalvo covers labor and economy in California’s Central Valley for The Fresno Bee/Fresnoland as a Report for America Corps member. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a B.A. in international relations, minors in business law and French, and Renaissance scholar and Global scholar distinctions.

Rachel Becker is a reporter with a background in scientific research. After studying the links between the brain and the immune system, Rachel left the lab bench with her master’s degree to become a journalist via the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. For nearly three years, Rachel was a staff science reporter at The Verge, where she wrote stories and hosted videos covering a range of beats including climate change, nicotine, and nuclear technology. Rachel now covers California’s complex water challenges and water policy issues for CalMatters. In 2021 she won first place for Outstanding Beat Reporting from the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Dr. Daniel Swain is a climate scientist focused on the dynamics and impacts of extreme events—including droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires—on a warming planet. Daniel holds joint appointments as a research scientist within UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, a research fellow in the Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the California climate fellow at The Nature Conservancy. Daniel engages extensively with journalists and other partners, serving as a climate and weather science liaison to print, radio, television, and web media outlets to facilitate broadly accessible and accurate coverage surrounding climate change. Daniel also authors the Weather West blog (weatherwest.com), which provides real-time perspectives on California and western North American weather and climate. He can be found on Twitter @Weather_West.

Will Cowan earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California. He studies the history of extremes of weather and water in the North American West. His dissertation, “The Pacific Slope Superstorms of 1861-1862,” is the first historical reconstruction of the Big Winter of 1862, one of the most cataclysmic seasons in North America’s past. The project fuses environmental history, Indigenous studies, and disaster studies, and underscores the significance of atmospheric rivers on the Pacific West. Will is currently a postdoctoral researcher for the USC Humanities in a Digital World Program and Early Modern Studies Institute, as well as an adjunct professor of history at Santa Monica College.

William F. Deverell received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in American Studies with honors and distinction. He received his Ph.D. in American History from Princeton University. He is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, which was founded in 2004. He also directs the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative. He previously taught at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego.

Professor Deverell teaches and writes about the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books exploring a variety of topics and themes. They include The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles (co-edited with Greg Hise); The Blackwell Companion to California History (co-edited with David Igler); and The Blackwell Companion to the History of the American West. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910, as well as the recently-published Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy that Transfixed the Nation. With the historian Tom Sitton, he is the co-editor of Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s and California Progressivism Revisited. With Greg Hise, he co-authored Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region and co-edited Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. He and Professor Anne Hyde of the University of Oklahoma co-authored the two volume Shaped by the West: A History of North America.  

Geraldine Knatz is Professor of the Practice of Policy and Engineering, a joint appointment between the USC Price School of Public Policy and the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. At the Price School, Dr. Knatz will teach as well as conduct research in affiliation with the METRANS Transportation Center.

Dr. Knatz served as the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles from 2006 to January 2014. She was the first woman to serve in this role and made a significant impact through the creation and implementation of the San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Plan, an aggressive plan that reduced air emissions by combined port operations of over 70 percent over five years. The Clean Air Action Plan is recognized around the world for its innovation and success.

Prior to directing the Port of Los Angeles, Dr. Knatz was the managing director of the Port of Long Beach where she also led a number of environmental initiatives, including the Green Port Policy and Truck Trip Reduction Program.

Alex Cohen is an anchor at Spectrum News 1. She is a California resident since she was two years old, Alex Cohen knows the ins and outs of L.A. She grew up in the San Fernando Valley and now proudly calls Northeast L.A. her home. For several years, she played roller derby with the L.A. Derby Dolls under the name Axles of Evil.

Alex started off her career as a radio producer and director at NPR, fast forward to 2018 and she is now one of the anchors of Your Morning and the host of Inside the Issues on Spectrum News 1 SoCal. This veteran reporter holds the Golden Mike Award for Best Live Coverage of a News Story and the L.A. Press Club Award for Best Anchor, to name a few.

Shing Yin Khor is the author-illustrator of The Legend of Auntie Po, the Eisner-winning and National Book Award finalist graphic novel about a young Chinese logging camp cook in the Sierra Nevada telling Paul Bunyan tales, and of The American Dream?, a graphic novel memoir about driving Route 66. They tell stories about nostalgic Americana, immigration, and new rituals. They live in Los Angeles with a small dog and a cargo van.

Sue Fawn Chung, Professor Emerita, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, received her master’s from Harvard and her doctorate from UC Berkeley.  She is the author of numerous articles on Chinese Americans and has published four books on the subject: The Chinese in the Woods: Logging and Lumbering in the American West. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015; In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Caroline Bancroft History Honor Award, 2013. Paperback Edition, 2014. The Chinese in Nevada, Charleston, SC: Arcadia Press in their “Images of America” Series, 2011. Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors eds. Sue Fawn Chung and Priscilla Wegars, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2005. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Chinese railroad labor contractors in the 19th century as a continuation of her work on the Stanford University Chinese Railroad Workers’ Project.

Stacey L. Camp is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Campus Archaeology Program at Michigan State University. Her work has focused on the history and archaeology of migrants and diasporic communities living in the 19th and 20th century Western United States. She is the author of The Archaeology of Citizenship (University Press of Florida), co-author of Introducing Archaeology, Third Edition (University of Toronto Press), and third author of Through the Lens of Anthropology: An Introduction to Human Evolution and Culture, Third Edition (University of Toronto Press).

Will Gow is a California-based community historian, educator, and documentary filmmaker. A fourth-generation Chinese American and a proud graduate of the San Francisco Unified School District, he holds an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies with a designated emphasis in Film Studies from UC Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Sacramento State, he taught Asian American Studies courses at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. Driven by an interest in his family history, he served as a volunteer historian and board member at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC). At the CHSSC, he founded and directed the Chinatown Remembered Project. This project paired youth interns with community elders to document the history of Los Angeles Chinatown in the 1930s and 1940s through oral history and digital video. He is currently co-editing a book for the CHSSC about the five Chinatowns of mid-twentieth century Los Angeles.

Gustavo Arellano is author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of its daily news podcast “The Times,” and has been an essayist and reporter for various publications and a frequent commentator on radio and television. He was formerly editor of OC Weekly, an alternative newspaper in Orange County, California, and penned the award-winning “¡Ask a Mexican!,” a nationally syndicated column in which he answered any and all questions about America’s spiciest and largest minority. Gustavo is the recipient of awards ranging from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies for Best Columnist to the Los Angeles Press Club President’s Award to an Impacto Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition, and was recognized by the California Latino Legislative Caucus with a 2008 Spirit Award for his “exceptional vision, creativity, and work ethic.” Gustavo is a lifelong resident of Orange County and is the proud son of two Mexican immigrants, one whom came to this country in the trunk of a Chevy.

Kelly Lytle Hernández is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at UCLA where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and the forthcoming book Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022). She also leads Million Dollar Hoods, a big data research initiative documenting the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.

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.

Pedro Noguera is Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education and a Distinguished Professor of Education. Dr. Noguera is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, the Phi Delta Kappa honor society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A sociologist, his research focuses on the ways schools are influenced by social and economic conditions, as well as by demographic trends in local, regional, and global contexts. 

Dr. James Whitfield is an education advocate centered on creating safe, nurturing, and equitable learning environments which, in turn, help transform communities. His passion includes sharing insightful stories of the power of education, leading with love, integrity, and dignity, overcoming adversity, and fighting with purpose and conviction for truth and justice. Dr. Whitfield is skilled in building positive culture, creating sustainable change, innovation, and dynamic coaching to build excellent and equitable learning environments for all students. Education changed the course of his life and he’s driven by a deep sense of purpose to ensure every student feels seen, heard, valued, and has access to an excellent and equitable educational experience.

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs is a political scientist at Acadia University, where he specializes in judicial politics, academic freedom, and the Middle East. He has written widely on the topics of campus free speech and Education Gag Orders (aka “anti-CRT laws”), and is currently a consultant for PEN America’s Free Expression and Education Program.

Susan Straight is the author of several novels, including the national bestseller Highwire Moon, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Million Nightingales, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as the memoir In the Country of Women, named a best book of 2019 by NPR and Real Simple. She is the recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She was born and continues to live in Riverside, California, with her family, where she serves as Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Héctor Tobar is the Los Angeles-born author of five books, including the novels The Tattooed Soldier and The Last Great Road Bum. His nonfiction Deep Down Dark was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller. His books have been translated into 15 languages. His novel The Barbarian Nurseries won the California Book Award, and his fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories. He earned his MFA from UC Irvine and is currently an associate professor of Chicano/Latino Studies and English at UC Irvine.As a journalist, he has been a foreign correspondent and has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and others.

Kent Blansett is a Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Shawnee, and Potawatomi descendant from the Blanket, Panther, and Smith families. He is the Langston Hughes Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies and History at the University of Kansas. Professor Blansett also serves as the founder and Executive Director for the American Indian Digital History Project. He authored the first biography to explore the dynamic life and times of Akwesasne Mohawk student leader Richard Oakes, a central figure in the 1969 takeover of Alcatraz Island by the organization Indians of All Tribes. Published by Yale University Press, his book, A Journey to Freedom: Richard Oakes, Alcatraz, and the Red Power Movement highlights Oakes’s pivotal role in Red Power activism throughout the 1960s and 1970s that continues to influence Native liberation movements throughout North America. Blansett’s biography attracted national attention with reviews in the Los Angeles Times, Indian Country Today, just to name a few, and was optioned for a future Hollywood movie. His curated museum exhibit “Not Your Indians Anymore: Alcatraz and the Red Power Movement, 1969-71,” is sponsored by the National Park Service on Alcatraz Island and viewable by the visitors until the summer of 2021. Blansett’s scholarship has received numerous fellowships and awards including the prestigious Katrin H. Lamon Fellowship with the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His latest book co-edited with Cathleen Cahill and Andrew Needham is entitled Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization was published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Jan Hansen is a historian of the United States and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular interest in social, political, urban, environmental, and technological history. His current research explores the role of infrastructure in conceptions of social order after 1850. Previously, he has written on the history of the Cold War, specifically on anti-nuclear protests in West Germany in the 1980s. Jan has been an Assistant Professor of History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since 2014. He was a Visiting Professor of History at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2015), a Visiting Research Fellow in the History of the Americas at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC (2017–18), and a Dibner Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at The Huntington, San Marino, CA (2019). He also serves as a book review editor for H-Soz-Kult.

Nicole Dawn Strathman is a former Smithsonian fellow, and currently a lecturer in the Department of History at UC Irvine. She earned her Ph.D. in World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and holds dual Master’s degrees in history and art history from UC Riverside.  Her research focuses on Native American visual culture, Indigenous self-representation, and digital heritage studies.  Her first book, Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography, won the Joan Paterson Kerr Award for the best illustrated book on the American West by the Western History Association.

William Bauer is an enrolled citizen of the Round Valley Indian Tribes and a professor of American Indian history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research examines the history of Indigenous People, work and sovereignty in the American West.  Bauer is the author of We Are the Land: A Native History of California, with Damon Akins, (University of California Press, 2021), California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (University of Washington Press, 2016),“We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here”: Work, Community and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) as well as articles in the Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the West and Labor: Studies in Working Class History.

Wade Davies is a professor of Native American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula, where he teaches courses on Native American history and Indigenous sporting traditions. His books include Native Hoops: The Rise of American Indian Basketball, 1895-1970; Healing Ways: Navajo Health Care in the Twentieth Century; “We Are Still Here”: American Indians since 1890, with Peter Iverson; and American Indian Sovereignty and Law: An Annotated Bibliography, with Richmond L. Clow.

Maurice Crandall is a citizen of the Yavapai-Apache Nation of Camp Verde, Arizona. He is a historian of the Indigenous peoples of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. His multi-award-winning book, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2019. He is currently working on a project that examines the contributions of former Yavapai and Western Apache U.S. Army Indian Scouts to their communities after the so-called Apache Wars.