Professor Laura Barraclough (PhD, University of Southern California, 2006) is an interdisciplinary scholar of land, memory, identity, and inequality in the United States. Her work integrates theories and methods from history, geography, and comparative ethnic studies.
Much of Professor Barraclough’s research has focused on the U.S. West – how colonialism, racism, sexism, and class inequality are produced and challenged through the cultural politics of land-use. She is especially interested in the tension between the rural and the urban as a constitutive dimension of this process. Her first book, Making the San Fernando Valley: Rural Landscapes, Urban Development, and White Privilege (University of Georgia Press, 2011), shows how the intentional production of rural landscapes in Los Angeles since 1900 has been a vehicle for constructing settler colonialism and whiteness. Her second book, Charros: How Mexican Cowboys are Remapping Race and American Identity (University of California Press, 2019), looks at how Mexican Americans in a range of southwestern cities have used the figure of the charro for social justice, cultural citizenship, and place-making initiatives. Dr. Barraclough’s current research examines how Native communities and communities of color have used the National Historic Trail system, a public history program established by U.S. Congress in 1978, to disrupt white-settler narratives of American history and to tell their own stories.