FORM and LANDSCAPE

Eric Avila [CONSUMPTION] is Associate Professor of History, Chicano Studies and Urban Planning at UCLA. He is author of Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles and The Folklore of the Freeway: Highway Construction and the Making of Race in the Modernist City (forthcoming).
Claudia Bohn-Spector [TEXT] is an independent scholar and curator with a doctorate in art history from the University of Munich, Germany. She has worked in various roles for such institutions as the J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the International Center for Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her most recent projects include the exhibitions "Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken" at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA, and "This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs" at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. She is currently at work on a traveling exhibition on the work of Bruce Nauman.
William Deverell [COLLISIONS] is Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and Chair of USC's History department. An historian of the 19th and 20th century West, he is the author of a number of studies addressing the history of the history of race, politics, and the environment in the far West. He is the fortunate recipient of any number of -- entirely welcome-- intellectual and collegial collisions with friends and colleagues (such as this one) which have resulted in projects exploring the fascinating history of greater Los Angeles.
John Eder [REPEAT] grew up in south Florida and studied photography at University of Florida with Jerry Uelsmann. After graduation, he worked in NYC and LA as an assistant to many photographers before venturing out on his own. He found this "Repeat" assignment especially interesting, given a fascination with urban archaeology and the complex history of greater Los Angeles.
Jared Farmer [FLORA] teaches History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize. Professor Farmer is the author of three books, mostly recently Trees in Paradise: A California History, which will be released by W. W. Norton in fall 2013. He considers the Golden State his second home.
Dianne Harris [DOMESTICITY] is Director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) and Professor of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art History, and History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she teaches courses in landscape history, urban/suburban history, and in architectural history. Her research consistently examines the relationship between the built environment and the construction of racial and class identities. Her most recent publications include a multidisciplinary edited volume on the Pennsylvania Levittown titled Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania and she is the author of Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America.
Greg Hise [SCALE] studies urban growth and social relations in American cities. In five books and more than twenty-five essays he has sought to explain how the politics of economic development have intersected with the ideals and aspirations people have brought to bear as they strove to create a better city. His investigations of metropolitan Los Angeles, regions and regionalism, and architecture as state building have received multiple prizes and have appeared in journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Europe. Currently Hise is writing a history of the struggle for open housing presented as a fundamental facet of the long Civil Rights movement, a story told through the career of activist attorney Loren Miller that brings California to the forefront of a narrative heretofore southern and northern in its geography.
Hillary Jenks [UNDOCUMENTED] is an historian and an Assistant Professor in the University Honors Program at Portland State University. Her published scholarship has explored multiracial communities and metropolitan spatial formation in the twentieth-century U.S. West, with particular attention to southern California. Her new research, funded in part through a recent Getty fellowship, explores the politics of racial diversity in aerospace suburbs and the role of historic preservation and "green" policies in revitalizing Western cities. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California in 2008.
Jessica Kim [FOODSCAPES] is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the USC-Huntington Institute on California and the West. She holds a PhD in history from USC and is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the relationship between Los Angeles and Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly the role of Los Angeles venture capitalists in Mexico. She is a native to southern California and has enjoyed many years of eating her way across the region. In the fall of 2013, she begins an appointment as Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Northridge.
Mark Klett [LANDSCAPE] is a photographer interested in the intersection of cultures, landscapes and time. His background includes working as a geologist before turning to photography. Klett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. Klett’s work has been exhibited and published in the United States and internationally for over thirty years, and his work is held in over eighty museum collections worldwide. He is the author/co-author of fifteen books. Klett lives in Tempe, Arizona where he is Regents’ Professor of Art at Arizona State University.
Martin H. Krieger [LABOR] is Professor of Planning at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. Over the last fifteen years he has been systematically photographing and aurally recording Los Angeles—800 storefront churches, 150 DWP electrical stations, people at work in industry at 225 sites, public conversations on buses, and much more. Urban Tomographies is an account of his work and methods. His PhD, in physics, is from Columbia.
Alan Loomis [STREETSCAPES] is the Principal Urban Designer for the City of Glendale, California, where he leads the City’s Design Studio, which is responsible for developing and enforcing design policies, guidelines and historic preservation programs, in addition to providing design advice to city departments and boards. He teaches urban design at Woodbury University in Burbank and co-edited the book Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric Region, a survey of regional smart growth architecture and urbanism published for CNUXIII.
Catherine Opie [FABRICATION] was born in Sandusky, Ohio and received her MFA from CalArts in 1988. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Select solo exhibitions include "Catherine Opie: Empty and Full" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011). "Catherine Opie: Figure and Landscape" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010), "Catherine Opie: American Photographer" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008). Opie is the 2013 recipient of the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award, and was awarded a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. She is currently a Professor of Photography at UCLA.
Marguerite S. Shaffer [RECREATION] is Associate Professor of American Studies and History and the Director of the American Studies Program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her work focuses on the intersections of cultural studies and environmental history in the U.S. with an emphasis on issues of popular environmentalism, consumer culture, and public culture. She is the author of See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 and the editor of Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States. She has published a number of articles on nudism, tourism, national parks, scenery, and regional identity of the American West. She is currently working on two projects related to the everyday conception and consumption of nature and the natural.
Emily Thompson [LIGHT] is a Professor at Princeton University where she teaches U.S. history and the history of technology. Her research typically focuses on sound, so she has enjoyed this opportunity to play with light for a change. She is working on a book, Sound Effects, about the transition from silent to sound motion pictures in the American film industry. A fan of both coasts, she will soon publish a website, The Roaring 'Twenties, about noise in New York City circa 1930. When ready, it will be accessible through the online journal Vectors, or at www.nycitynoise.com.
D. J. Waldie [NOIR] is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and other books about Los Angeles and southern California. He is the former deputy city manager of Lakewood, a city that is not even remotely noir adjacent. Unable to drive, he often walks the streets of Los Angeles, but he doesn’t find them particularly mean. He doesn’t find the sunshine sinister, either. He believes that the conventions of film noir are best understood on screen in moody black-and-white and not as a general theory of Los Angeles.
Jennifer A. Watts [ARCHIVE] is Curator of Photographs at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, where she oversees a collection of more than one million images, the Edison archive included. Her exhibitions and research focus primarily on California and American West, most notably "This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs" (2008), "Edward Weston: A Legacy" (2003), and "The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West" (2001). She is editor and contributing author to Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream about the life and career of an important mid-century architectural and garden photographer. Her most recent exhibition was "A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War" (http://huntington.org/civilwar).
Peter Westwick [TECHNOLOGY] teaches History of Science and Technology at USC and directs the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He received his BA in physics and PhD in history from UC Berkeley. He is the author of Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004 and The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947-1974, and editor of Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California. He is also co-author with Peter Neushul of Epic: An Unconventional History of Surfing and the World, which among other things examines surfing technology in Southern California.