Laura Renee Barraclough, newly designated as the Sarai K. Ribicoff Associate Professor of American Studies, teaches and conducts research on American cities, race, class, and immigration.
Barraclough’s scholarship integrates archival, ethnographic, and spatial analyses of urban life and culture. She is the author of “Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White Privilege” and co-author of “A People’s Guide to Los Angeles,” an alternative tourist guidebook that highlights sites of racial, gender, sexual, labor, and environmental struggle in the city. The latter volume received the Globe Award for Public Understanding of Geography from the Association of American Geographers and the Southern California Independent Bookseller Association Award for Non-Fiction.
Barraclough is co-editor of the new “People’s Guide” book series for the University of California Press, with publications forthcoming in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, and other cities. Her next book, which examines how Mexican Americans have used the figure of the charro (Mexican cowboy) for social justice in cities across the U.S. Southwest, will be published next year by the University of California Press. Articles from that project have recently been published in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies and Ethnic and Racial Studies.
The Yale professor received her Ph.D. in American studies and ethnicity from the University of Southern California. She has taught at Kalamazoo College, Antioch University-Los Angeles, and California State University-Fullerton.