Global Spanish Fantasies

Bringing in both new and familiar voices to consider what’s new in the field and how our collective understanding may have changed, this series explores the history of the West through a reflective and multifaceted lens.

About the Speakers:

Caroline Collins is a University of California President’s postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, and an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego, where she is also affiliated with the Democracy Lab and the Indigenous Futures Institute. Her work examines public remembrances of the American West through archival methods, ethnographic study, media production, and public history exhibition. Collins is currently working with University of California Press on her first book manuscript exploring the making of race and place at Old Town San Diego State Historic Park.

Genevieve Carpio is an associate professor in UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, where she teaches courses in U.S. history, suburban studies, and spatial theory. She is the author of Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019). Professor Carpio’s current book project examines cultural exchange between California and the Pacific World through the transit of Spanish mission architecture. An article drawn from this project, “Zorro Down Under,” earned the Western History Association’s Michael P. Malone Award for the best article on state history in North America.

Phoebe Young is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she teaches the cultural and environmental history of the modern United States and the American West. Her first book, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (University of California Press, 2006), examined public memories of the Spanish past, the built environment, regional development, and race relations in Southern California between the 1880s and the 1930s. Her most recent book, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in America from the Civil War to Occupy (Oxford University Press, 2021), traced 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. Camping Grounds won the 2022 Norris & Carol Hundley Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. She is also co-editor of a book series at the University of Washington Press on “The Outdoors: Recreation, Environment, and Culture.”

This webinar is part of the Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West’s 20th Anniversary Considering Anew Series.