Shapiro Center Fellowships

The Shapiro Center for American History and Culture supports both short-term and long-term fellowships to conduct academic research in The Huntington’s collections. See Research & Fellowships for more information.

2024–25 Long-Term Award

Alison Hirsch SHAPIRO CENTER FOR AMERICAN HISTORY & CULTURE FELLOW

Alison Hirsch, Associate Professor, Architecture, University of Southern California

Topic: The Other California: Land, Loss, Labor, and Liberated Futures Along Phantom Shores

Alison B. Hirsch is a landscape historian and designer. She is Associate Professor in the USC School of Architecture and Director/Founder of the Landscape Justice Initiative. Dr. Hirsch was the 2017-2018 Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and directed the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program at USC from 2019 to 2023. Author of books and publications primarily on urban landscapes and spatial politics, Alison’s fellowship year at the Huntington Library will be focused on a forthcoming book, titled The Other California: land, labor, and liberated futures along phantom shores, that builds on five years of action research in design, planning, and community history work in the Tulare Lake Basin, the lower third of the Great Central Valley. After fourteen atmospheric rivers hit California in March 2023, as another expression of climate whiplash, Tulare Lake remerged, provoking new imaginaries for the future of its existence and the existence of those who call the lake home. Materially and culturally shaped by the geographic condition of this endorheic basin and its disappeared lake that haunts the land by its periodic reemergence, this narrative is a cultural and environmental history of violence and vast inequality created by 150 years of capitalist agriculture, as well as a story of resistance and how land-based practices of insurgent cultural expression have set the foundation for liberated futures. As a landscape historian and landscape designer, Alison will tell this story as a record of human relations to the uniqueness of this physical landscape and a guide on how to support radical change at a pressing moment, as well as provide broader visibility to processes of land loss, structural violence, critical forms of land-based cultural resistance, and methods of repair that have created conditions for the implementation of more just futures.

2024–25 Short-Term Awards

Charlotte Biggs, PhD Candidate, UC Riverside
Las Floridianas: Indigenous Resilience, Gendered Power, and Atlantic Mobility. 1763-1784
One month

Taylor Rose, PhD Candidate, Yale University
Making No Man’s Land: Mining Infrastructure and Military Conquest in Nevada, 1860–1930
One month