Angeles National Forest, CA (1988)

Downtown Los Angeles
Looking south from Angeles Crest Highway
Arroyo Seco Canyon, Angeles National Forest, CA (1988)

California Studies Scholars

 

 

 

 


Visiting Scholars

Past Visitors

Julie Guthman, Lecturer (2003-04)
Geography Department, 507 McCone Hall
jguthman@berkeley.edu

Julie Guthman, our first resident postdoctoral fellow at the California Studies Center, is one of four recipients of the Kevin Starr Fellowship in California Studies for academic year 2000-2001. Dr. Guthman received her doctorate from the Department of Geography at Berkeley. Guthman's dissertation "Agrarian Dreams? The Paradox of Organic Farming in California" is the first comprehensive study of the organic farming sector in California. It shows that broader political and economic forces -- rather than individual attitudinal change -- are the causes of recent growth in the sector. Particularly because growth is primarily based on conversions, organic agriculture has taken on many of the legacies of California's industrial agriculture that it is idiomatically positioned against. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation, the University of California's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Project, and the Association of American Geographers.

Dr. Guthman received a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz in 1979, and then M.B.A. at Berkeley in 1988 where she focused on nonprofit management as well as business and public policy. She completed her M.A. in Geography in 1995, with a thesis entitled "Environmental Crisis and Development Discourse in the Nepal." She has since published in Antipode, Sociologia Ruralis, Development and Change, and Agriculture and Human Values and is currently developing three additional manuscripts for upcoming edited volumes. In between degrees she was involved in several community and electoral initiatives around peace, economic justice, and environmental issues. This work took her to many communities in the state, including extended trips to the central valley. She has also held several positions in nonprofit financial management with major Bay Area agencies.


Marta Gutman (2002-03)
Visiting Scholar, California Studies Center, University of California, Berkeley

Marta Gutman, who is a licensed architect (M.Arch., Columbia 1981) and architectural and urban historian (Ph.D., University of California Berkeley, 2000), has just completed her second year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Berkeley Center for Working Families. Her principal project at the California Studies Center will be to complete the manuscript of What Kind of City: Women, Charitable Landscapes, and Urban Building in California. This book examines the effects of women’s philanthropy and incremental land improvement on modernizing cities, using the under-studied city of Oakland as a case study example. Gutman argues that the reform-minded women, who built charitable institutions in late-nineteenth-century California cities, set up a potent armature for the expansion of urban public buildings and spaces during the twentieth century, even as the effects of inequality, ideology, power, and identity were written and rewritten into benevolent settings. The book is drawn from Gutman’s dissertation, "On the Ground in Oakland: Women and Institution Building in an Industrial City," awarded the "Best Dissertation in Urban History" prize by the Urban History Association (2001).

As a Visiting Scholar, Gutman will bring to the California Studies Center a commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry and desire to join (and shape) the public dialogue on the past, present, and future of the state of California. Affiliation with the California Studies Center will also help Gutman bring the book manuscript to completion. As she works on revising the manuscript and incorporating new research into the text, Gutman will draw on the wide range of expertise of California Studies Center affiliates. She will also benefit from access to the incomparable resources of the Bancroft Library and other university libraries and archives, which will help deepen and enrich her understanding of the ties of caregiving institutions to each other, women’s caregiving networks, and the state. As a Visiting Scholar, Gutman will also continue to interview people who used the charities as children, working to incorporate children’s voices and experiences into her account of the development of Oakland’s charitable landscape.


Ava Kahn (2005-06)
akahn@alum.calberkeley.org

Ava received a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She came to the Bay Area in 1991 to serve as the Research Associate for the Western Jewish History Center of the Judah Magnes Museum. She has since taught in the Jewish Studies Departments of San Francisco State University and University of California at Davis. For the past year, Ava has been working with the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles on their exhibition "Jewish Life in the American West: Generation to Generation" which opens at the end of February 2002. Her forthcoming publications include: Jewish Voices of the California Gold Rush: A Documentary History 1849-1880 (Wayne State University Press, 2001); Generation to Generation: Jewish Life in the American West, (University of Washington Press, 2002) an edited anthology; California Jews co-edited with Marc Dollinger (Brandeis University Press, 2002) and "Oral History and Jewish Life," Journal of American History (September, 2001). Kahn's other publications include contributions to Oral History Review and the American Jewish Archives, as well as entries depicting Californians in Jewish Women In America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Currently, Ava is working on the origins of Jewish immigrants in the West as well as continuing her work with Glenna Matthews on Florence Prag Kahn.


 


Berkeley Scholars

 

Dr. Carroll Brentano, Coordinator, University History Project
Center for Studies in Higher Education, South Hall Annex
cbrentan@berkeley.edu, (510) 643 9210

As managing editor of new semi-annual periodical the Chronicle of the University of California, Dr. Brentano is interested in all periods and aspects of the history of UC on all its campuses. Her special interest is campus architecture and planning and she has recently published articles in A Case Study of the 1915 University of California Faculty Computing Tecniques and the History of Universities (1997); The Two Berkeleys: City and University Through 125 Years in Minerva (1995); and Stately and Glorious Buildings in Planning History (1994).


John A. Douglass, Research Fellow
Center for Studies in Higher Education, South Hall Annex #4650 University of California, Berkeley
douglass@berkeley.edu, (510) 643-9211

John A. Douglass is the author of the new book The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan (Stanford University Press) and a large number of policy papers on California higher education. Recent scholarly publications include articles in The Journal of Policy History, California Politics and Policy, History of Education Quarterly, The American Behavioral Scientists, the European Journal of Education and the History of Higher Education Annual. He is currently working on the book Affirming Opportunity, a study on the development of affirmative action and the history of admissions at the University of California and other major public research universities (Vanderbilt University Press). He is also the director of the UC History Project Website which will offer on-line access to major historical archives related to the management and development of the University of California. See http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/jdouglass/ for on-line reports, listings of recent publications and further information.


Charles B. Faulhaber, Professor
Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese & Director, The Bancroft Library
cfaulhab@library.berkeley.edu, (510) 642-1458
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/autobiography/cfaulhaber

A Hispanist and medievalist by training, my primary interest in California Studies is in Hispanic California from the beginnings to the present. By virtue of my position at Bancroft, I am interested in all aspects of California, historical and contemporary


Marcial González, Assistant Professor
Department of English, 322 Wheeler Hall
marcial@berkeley.edu, (510) 642-4957

Dr.González' research interests include Chicana/o literature, the theory of the novel, and the politics of postmodernism. He is writing a book on the repression and revelation of history in the Chicana/o novel and recently published an article entitled "Jameson's Arrested Dialectic: From Structuralism to Postmodernism" in Cultural Logic (Spring) 1999. He teaches courses in American literature, Chicana/o literature and literary theory.


Percy C. Hintzen, Chair and Associate Professor
African American Studies, 660 Barrows Hall, Campus MC 2572
phintzen@berkeley.edu, (510) 642 7107

Prof. Hintzen teaches courses in Political and Economic Development, African and Caribbean Political Economy, and Comparative Race and Ethnic Relations. His research focuses on race, ethnicity and class as identity constructs in post-colonial political economy, with a sub-focus on immigrant identity construction in the United States, concentrating on West Indian migrants and urban America, especially Oakland. Publications include: The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad. (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989); seventy-one biographic entries on Caribbean and Haitian leaders in the Dictionary of Latin American and Caribbean Political Biography edited by Robert J. Alexander (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1988); West Indians in the West, Self Representations in a Migrant Community (New York University Press, 1999); "Identity, Arena, and Performance: Being West Indian in the San Francisco Bay Area" in Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identies edited by Jean Rahier (Westport: Greenwood Press, Forthcoming); "Adapting to Segregation: African American Strategies in the Post Welfare Environment" Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy (Vol IV, 1998, pp 45-48).


Richard Hutson, Associate Professor
English Department, 322 Wheeler Hall
rhutson@berkeley.edu, 510-526-3188

Professor Hutson's interests cover the trans-mississippi West after the Civil War, especially the Great Plains and the open range cattle industry; California in the 19th century; and Westerns on film. He has a collection of essays being published on Andy Adams (a turn of the century writer on ranchers and trail drives), an essay on Gerald Vizenor's major autobiography, and an essay on Sam Peckinpah's rodeo film, "Junior Bonner."


Kerwin Lee Klein, Associate Professor
History Department, 2312 Dwinelle Hall, UCB

Kerwin Klein's first book, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990, was published by UC Press in 1997. He is currently completing a second book on California's intellectual history in the twentieth century. Klein teaches California and Western History, as well as 20th century American intellectual history.


G. Mathias Kondolf, Associate Professor
Depts of Landscape Architecture & Envtl Planning and Geography, 119 Wheeler Hall
kondolf@berkeley.edu, (510) 642 -904

Dr. Kondolf is a fluvial geomorphologist whose research concerns environmental river management, influences of land-use on rivers, notably effects of mining and dams on river systems, interactions of riparian vegetation and channel form, geomorphic influences on habitat for salmon and trout, alternative flood management strategies, and assessment of ecological restoration. Much of his research focuses on ecosystem restoration of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system. His courses include Hydrology for Planners, Restoration of Rivers and Streams, Ecological Analysis in Urban Design, and Introduction to Environmental Sciences. He received his PhD in Geography and Environmental Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. Selected Publications include: Kondolf, G.M., and W.V.G. Matthews. 1993. Management of coarse sediment in regulated rivers of California. University of California Water Resources Center, Riverside. Report No.80; Kondolf, G.M., R. Kattelmann, M. Embury, and D.C. Erman. 1996. Status of riparian habitat. Chapter 36 in Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project: Final Report to Congress, Vol. II, Assessments and scientific basis for management options. Report No. 88, Centers for Water and Wildland Resources, University of California, Davis, p.36-1 - 36-22; Kondolf, G.M., and P.R. Wilcock. 1996. The flushing flow problem: defining and evaluating objectives. Water Resources Research. 32(8):2589-2599; Kondolf, G.M., R. Kattelmann, M. Embury, and D.C. Erman. 1996. Status of riparian habitat. Chapter 36 in Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project: Final Report to Congress, Vol. II, Assessments and scientific basis for management options. Report No. 88, Centers for Water and Wildland Resources, University of California, Davis, p.36-1 - 36-22; Kondolf, G.M. 1997. Hungry water: effects of dams and gravel mining on river channels. Environmental Management. 21(4):533-551; Healey, M., W. Kimmerer, G.M. Kondolf, R. Meade, P.B. Moyle, and R. Twiss. 1998. Strategic Plan for the Ecosystem Restoration Program. CALFED Bay-Delta Program, Sacramento, California.

(Complete publications list: http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/landscape/kondolf)


Kent G. Lightfoot, Professor
Department of Anthropology, Archaeological Research Facility, 232 Kroeber Hall
lightfoo@sscl.berkeley.edu, (510) 642-1309

Professor Lightfoot's area of research is North American archaeology, he specializes in the study of coastal hunter-gatherer peoples, culture contact research, and the archaeology of colonialism. Since joining the Berkeley faculty in 1987, much of his research has focused on prehistoric Native Californian peoples and their later encounters with early European explorers and colonists. Professor Lightfoot works primarily in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. His recent archaelogical investigations have focused on the Russian Colony of Fort Ross, where a collaborative team of UC Berkeley, California State Park, and Kashaya Pomo scholars are considering the long-term implications of multi-ethnic interactions between Russians, Native Alaskans, and Native Californians in this colonial community. Recent publications on the Fort Ross investigations include:Lightfoot, K., A. Martinez and A. Schiff. 1998. Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaelogical Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California. American Antiquity 63 (2):199-222.; Lightfoot, K. G., A. M. Schiff and T. A. Wake. 1997. The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Fort Ross, California. Volume 2: The Native Alaskan Neighborhood: A Multiethnic Community at Colony Ross. Contributions of the University of California Archaeological Facility No. 55. Archaeological Research Facility, Berkeley, California; Lightfoot, K. G., and W. S. Simmons. 1998. Culture Contact in Protohistoric California: Social Contexts of Native and European Encounters. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 20(2):138-170.


Colleen Lye, Associate Professor
English Department, 322 Wheeler Hall
clye@berkeley.edu, (510) 642-3467

Colleen Lye is currently writing a book on the U.S.-Asian frontier in American literature in the era of Asian exclusion, entitled Model Modernity: the Making of Asiatic Racial Form, 1882-1945. She has published articles on Asian American literature and cultural studies, and serves on the editorial collective of Movements: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, a new Routledge journal forthcoming in Spring 2000. She teaches courses in Asian American Studies, American Studies and postcolonial theory.


Carolyn Merchant, Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics
Dept.of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, 207 Giannini Hall
merchant@nature.berkeley.edu, (510) 642-0326

Prof. Merchant is interested in California environmental history as seen through historical documents and the perceptions of diverse actors and observers and has done research on ethical conflicts involved in saving the state's biological heritage, developing its rich natural resources, and maintaining its quality of life. Her work includes an edited book Green Versus Gold: Sources in California's Environmental History (1998) and an article entitled, "Environmental Ethics and Political Conflict: A View from California," in Environmental Ethics (1990). Merchant is author of The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980); Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (1989); Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (1992); and Earthcare: Women and the Environment (1996), as well as numerous articles on the history of science, environmental history, and women and the environment. She is also the editor of Major Problems in American Environmental History (1993) and Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology (1994). She is the president-elect of the American Society for Environmental History and has served on the executive and advisory boards of several environmental journals and societies.


T. N. Narasimhan, Professor
Departments of Materials Science and Mineral Engineeering & Environmental Science, Policy and Management, 467 Evans Hall
tnnarasimhan@LBL.gov, (510) 642-4561

Expertise: Hydrogeology. Water below the land surface and its role as a geological agent. Teaching and Research: Water as a natural resource. Water and the biosphere, Water and Society. Of late, increasingly interested in working towards training students who would, as a matter of course, combine science and policy and society in regard to water and natural resources. Forthcoming book on California Water Resources.


Laura E. Perez, Assistant Professor
Department of Ethnic Studies, 560 Barrows Hall
leperez@berkeley.edu, (510) 643-1584

Research interests and a manuscript-in-progress are focused on the politics of culturally hybrid, new spiritualities, particularly in the visual and literary art practices of contemporary Chicana artists, most of whom are California-based. Recent publications include "Spirit Glyphs: Reimagining Art and Artist in the Work of Chicana Tlamatinime" (Modern Fiction Studies 44-1, Spring 1998: 37-76) and "El desorden, Nationalism, and Chicana/o Aesthetics," in Between Woman and Nation. Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. by Caren Kaplan et al., Duke University Press, 1999: 19-46.


Lisa Rubens, Free Speech Movement Digital Archives Project
Bancroft Library, UCB
lrubens@berkeley.edu, (510) 642-7395

Lisa Rubens is completing her doctorate under Lawrence Levine & Mary Ryan in the UCB History Department, on Tides West: S.F.'s l939 Worlds' Fair and the Remaking of American Identity. For twenty years she has taught, written, researched and consulted (at CCH and Cal Hist Soc among others), and raised a family in the Bay Area. She is the author of California Women's History Curriculum and Poster, State Department of Education, l983; Strike: Pictorial History of the S.F. Maritime Strike, Silver Dollar Press, l984; "Re-presenting the Nation at S.F.'s l939 World's Fair," in Robert Rydell, ed., Fair Representations, l995.


Theresa Salazar, Curator of the Collection of Western Americana
The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
tsalazar@library.berkeley.edu, (510) 643-8153

Dr. Salazar's goal is to build collections that reflect the cultural, political, economic, and social activities of California and the West, from pre-contact through the present -- building on the strengths of the rich historical collection at the Bancroft, as well as introducing new collecting areas that reflect the late 20th century and look towards the 21lst.


Stephen Tobriner, Professor
Architecture Dept., 232 Wurster Hall
Tobriner@berkeley.edu, (510) 642-4098

Prof. Tobriner is interested in the history of urbanism and architecture in California, the history of San Francisco in particular. One of his fields is engineering and the history of reconstruction after earthquakes, and he is writing a book about the architectual responses to the many earthquakes that have struck San Francisco.


Richard Walker, Professor
Department of Geography, 507 McCone Hall
walker@berkeley.edu, (510) 525-1969

Dr. Walker has written on a diverse range of topics in economic geography, urban studies, and environmental policy. He is co-author, with Michael Storper, of The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology and Industrial Growth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) and, with Andrew Sayer, of The New Social Economy: Reworking the Division of Labor (Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1992). More recently, his focus has been on the regional pecularities of California. He is a co-founder of the California Studies Association and is currently at work on books on the San Francisco Bay Area before and after 1945 and another on the long-term development of California. Pertinent articles are: Landscape and city life: four ecologies of residence in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ecumene 2(1), 1995, 33-64; California rages against the dying of the light. New Left Review, 209, 1995, 42-74; Another round of globalization in San Francisco, Urban Geography, 17(1), 1996, 60-94; California’s collision of race and class, Representations, No. 55, Summer 1996, 163-183: California rages: regional capitalism and the politics of renewal. IN: R. Lee and J. Wills, eds., Geographies of Economies. London: Edward Arnold, 1997, pp. 345-356; An appetite for the city. In: James Brook, Chris Carlsson and Nancy Peters, eds. Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture. SF: City Lights Books, 1998, pp. 1-20.


 


Affiliate Scholars

 

Michael Peter Smith, Professor
Community Studies and Development Program, Department of Human and Community Development, Hart Hall, University of California, Davis 95616
mpsmith@ucdavis.edu, mpsmith@verio.com
Office (530) 752-2243, Home: (510) 644-1954

Prof. Smith's research interests are situated within the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. He has written extensively in the areas of urban social theory, the political economy of urbanization, racial and ethnic formation, immigration, and transnationalism. During the past decade, he has studied the impact of the transnational economic, socio- cultural and political practices linking cities and regions in California to other communities and regions across the globe. The sites for this research include San Francisco, Sacramento, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles. Recent publications include: Transnationalism and Urban Theory: Locating Globalization. (Blackwell, 2000); Transnationalism from Below. (Transaction, 1998) ed., with L. E. Guarnizo; California's Changing Faces: New Immigrant Survival Strategies and State Policy. (California Policy Seminar, l993) with B. Tarallo.


Al Sokolow, Public Policy Specialist, UC Cooperative Extension Associate Chair
Department of Human and Community Development and Associate Director, Agricultural Issues Center UC Davis, Davis, CA. 95616 2315 Hart Hall
ajsokolow@ucdavis.edu, (530) 752-0979

Al Sokolow's research interests concern community governance, California politics and policy, and intergovernmental relations. His current work focuses on farmland and land use policy, community autonomy and local government finance, and small community politics. Recent Publications: California Farmland and Urban Pressures: Statewide and Regional Perspectives (co-editor, with Albert G. Medvitz and Cathy Lemp), Agricultural Issues Center, UC Davis, 1999. "The Changing Property Tax and State-Local Relations", Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Vol.28, No. 1, Winter, 1998, pp. 165-187. "Farmland Policy in California's Central Valley: State, County and City Roles", CPS Brief, Vol 9, No 2. California Policy Seminar, UC Berkeley, October, 1997.


Miriam J. Wells, Professor
Anthropology Program, Department of Human and Community Development
Hart Hall, University of California, Davis 95616
mjwells@ucdavis.edu, (530) 752-7038

Interests include labaor, labor markets, and work; social movements and unionizaiton; interethnic and class relations; economic development and global restructuring; the role of the state; the social organization of agriculture. Recent publications include: Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996); "Politics, Locality, and Economic Restructuring: California's Central Coast Strawberry Industry in the Post World War II Period" (Economic Geography, Jan. 2000); "Immigration and Unionization in the San Francisco Hotel Industry" in Organizing Immigrants, Ruth Milkman, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Forthcoming, 2000)


Charles Wollenberg, Professor
Chair, Social Science Dept, Berkeley City College & Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library
cwolle@yahoo.com, (510) 981-2924

Charles Wollenberg specializes in California social history of the 20th Century. Among his many books are: All Deliberate Speed: Segregation And Exclusion In California Schools 1855-1975 (UC Press, 1978), Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives On Bay Area History (IGS, 1985) and Photographing The Second Gold Rush: Dorothea Lange And The Bay Area At War 1941-45 (Heyday Books, 1995). He is currently the convenor of the monthly California Studies dinner-lectures held at the UC Faculty Club.