Professor of History, History
School of Humanities

World History, Environmental History, & US Urban History

Honors:

2006 Esther McCoy Award, USC Architectural Guild
2004 Erich Shelling Architekturpreis 2004 (“outstanding contribution towards the architecture-theoretical discourse”)
1998 MacArthur Fellow
1997 Getty Fellow, Getty Institute, Santa Monica
1997 Avenali Professor, UC Berkeley
1997 Havens Center Fellow, Univ. of Wisconsin ( Madison)
1996 Regents Lecturer, UC Irvine
1995 Commencement Speaker, Dept. of Geography, U.C. Berkeley
1994 Visiting Fellow, Center for Comparative History and Social Theory, UCLA
1993 Commencement Speaker, Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, UCLA
1978-80 Danforth, Fulbright and Regents (UC) fellowships

Fiction:

Islands Mysterious: Where Science Rediscovers Wonder – a Trilogy (all illustrated by William Simpson)
1. Land of the Lost Mammoths, Perceval Press, Los Angeles 2003. (also Danish)
2. Pirates, Bats, and Dragons, Perceval Press, Los Angeles 2004. (also Danish)
3. Spider Vector, Perceval Press, Los Angeles (forthcoming)

In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire, Haymarket Books, Chicago (Spring) 2007 (At publisher, except introduction)
Collection of essays from Tom.dispatch.com and European newspapers.

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, Verso, London (spring) 2007 (will appear simultaneously in German and Turkish) in press.

Governments of the Poor: Politics and Survival in the Global Slum (with Forrest Hylton) Verso, London, (fall 2007)

Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neo-Liberalism (co-edited with Dan Monk)
New Press (in press, 2006)

No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border, Haymarket Books, Chicago 2006. (with Justin Akers Chacon)

Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class
Verso, London 2006
• Indonesian, German, Portuguese and Italian editions in press.

Under the Perfect Sun: the San Diego Tourists Never See, New Press, New York 2003 (with Jim Miller and Kelly Mayhew)

Dead Cities and other tales, New Press, New York, 2002.

The Grit Beneath the Glitter: stories from the real Las Vegas (co-edited with Hal Rothman), U.C. Press Berkeley, 2001

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, Verso, New York 2000.

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City, Verso, New York, 2000.
• Carey McWilliams Award

Casino Zombies: True Stories From the Neon West, Scharwze Risse, Berlin, 1999. (German Only)

The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, Metropolitan Books, New York 1998; and Vintage, New York 1999.

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Verso, London 1990; Vintage, New York 1992 (translated into 8 languages)
• selected by San Francisco Examiner poll as “one of the ten best non-fiction books on the U.S.
West published in the 20th century;”
• nominated for National Book Critics Circle award;
• `Best Book in Urban Politics', American Political Science Association;
• Issac Deutscher Award, London School of Economics

Prisoners of the American Dream, Verso London 1986
translated into German and Korean

The Monster at Our Door: the Global Threat of Avian Flu, New Press, New York 2005
• A revised paperback edition with two new chapters will be published by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt, New York (Fall 2006).

Cronache Dall’Impero, introduction by Benedetto Vecchi, Manifestolibri
Rome 2004 (book of essays that originally appeared in Il Manifesto, no English translation)
• Translations now in print in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, and Japanese, as well as Australian edition with separate epilogue. Arabic and Swedish editions are in press.

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=5486

Last updated
12/17/2007