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The LA History & Metro Studies Group fosters the study and understanding of southern California history and the history of metropolitan areas more broadly. Through seminars on scholarly works-in-progress, book lectures, and panel discussions on contemporary issues facing southern California and American cities, our goal is to promote urban history scholarship as a means of enriching the field and informing policy-making toward a more just, equitable future for our urban regions.

2026 – 2027

Events

Friday October 9, 2026, 10:30am – pre-circulated paper – @Seaver 1-2, Huntington

“The Pyrrhic Victory: Henry Cisneros, the National Homeownership Strategy, and the Limits of Latine Homeownership in the Neoliberal Order”

  1. Aron Ramirez, assistant professor, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

Friday November 6, 2026, 10:30am – pre-circulated paper – @Seaver 1-2, Huntington

“Arc Lights and Urban Boundaries: Streetlighting and the Shaping of Los Angeles”

Joshua Lappen, postdoctoral fellow, University of Notre Dame

Friday December 4, 2026, 10:30am – dissertation workshop – short, pre-circulated papers – @ San Gabriel Valley Humanities Center, 414 S. Mission Drive, San Gabriel

  • “Wives, Mothers, Sisters & Others: French Women in Los Angeles During the Progressive Era” Helene Demestre, Ph.D. candidate, Paris1 Pantheon Sorbonne
  • “Border Visibility: Anti-Immigrant Media and the Rise of Vigilante Surveillance in 1980s San Diego” Hailee Menchaca, Ph.D. candidate, UC Riverside

Tues. January 26, 2027, 6:00pm-8:30pm – @The Autry Museum of the American West

** Joint session with The Autry Museum of the American West

6:00 exhibit tour; 6:45 dinner, 7:15 roundtable book discussion

Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles exhibit tour + Visions of the Southland: A Year in Los Angeles County, edited by Bill Deverell and Wade Graham, roundtable book discussion

  • Bill Deverell, USC and ICW
  • Wade Graham, writer, historian, & landscape designer
  • Becky Nicolaides, Affiliated Research Scholar, Huntington-USC ICW
  • Sarah Schrank, Professor of History, CSU Long Beach
  • Susan Straight, Professor of Creative Writing, UC Riverside

Friday February 19, 2027, 10:30am – virtual

“Hilton of Hollywood: Expanding the Chain Beyond Texas” Megan Elias, Winiarski Curator of Food and Wine History, Smithsonian National Museum of American History

March 2027 – date and specific location TBD – @ Huntington Library

“The Haynes Foundation at 100: Governance and Democracy in the L.A. Region, Then and Now, A Centennial Perspective.”

  • Becky Nicolaides, Affiliated Research Scholar, Huntington-USC ICW
  • Caitlin Parker, Ph.D. candidate, UCLA

Friday April 9, 2027, 10:30am – Clark Davis Memorial lecture – @Seaver 1-2, Huntington

  • Dancing with Manifest Destiny: Elite Men of Color and the Making of American Los Angeles (University of Oklahoma Press, 2026) Daniel B. Lynch, History Instructor and Leonetti/O’Connell Honors Research in Humanities and Social Sciences Program Head, Marlborough School
  • Yiddish in the Land of Sunshine: Race, Labor, and Jewish Radicalism in Los Angeles (NYU Press 2026) Caroline Luce, Project Director, UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and Chief Curator, Mapping Jewish L.A.

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If you would like to receive announcements and RSVP links for these sessions, please fill out the form at:  http://tinyurl.com/LAMetroList.

If you’d like to attend, you must RSVP for each session.  Announcements will be emailed two weeks prior to each session, with logistical and RSVP information as well as links to pre-circulated papers (we are unable to distribute papers earlier than this). We request that participants read the papers if attending.

All sessions will begin at 10:30 a.m., unless otherwise specified. This year, our locations include:

  • Seaver Classrooms in the Munger Building at The Huntington Library
  • The San Gabriel Valley Humanities Center, 414 S. Mission Drive, San Gabriel
  • The Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles – on Tues. January 26, 2027, event begins at 6:00pm

Parking is free at all locations.

For more information, email the co-coordinators—Kathy Feeley, Oscar Gutierrez, Becky Nicolaides, Caitlin Parker, and Andrea Thabet—at LA.History.Group@gmail.com.

 The LA History & Metro Studies Group is generously sponsored by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW)

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Image credit: Building being demolished, U.S. Post Office, Los Angeles, Calif., 1937, Dick Whittington Studio, USC Libraries Special Collections.

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Recorded Sessions

Selected sessions from “#TIMESUP” to “Election 2018: The Political Landscape in LA and California” have been recorded and are available for viewing.

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RSVP to a meeting

If you would like to receive announcements for these sessions, please fill out the form at the RSVP link above.

For Zoom sessions: We will include Zoom sign-in information in the e-announcement. Please sign in on time. Please keep your video on and your audio muted until introductions and/or discussion begins. For those new to Zoom, please watch this video on etiquette (aimed at a student audience, but mostly apropos): https://spark.adobe.com/video/IzGAneJs8BNJr.

For in-person sessions: All sessions will begin at 10:30am in Seaver Classroom 3, in the Munger Building, Huntington Library, unless otherwise noted. Please check e-announcements for exact location of sessions. Parking is free.

For more information, email the co-coordinators — Kathy Feeley, Oscar Gutierrez, Becky Nicolaides, Caitlin Parker, and Andrea Thabet — at LA.History.Group@gmail.com.

Across Time

Archived Schedules

Schedules by year as well as a cumulative list of all presenters and papers are available for review.