I am an American and European historian (PhD, Temple University, 1999) in intellectual, social, and cultural history of the 19th and 20th Century that writes about urban history, architecture and urban planning, historical memory, anthropological race theory, history of science, intellectuals and war, and California and US Southwest history. My work has been published in scholarly journals and publications such as the Journal of the American Planning Association, Reviews in American History, New Mexico Historical Review, Journal of San Diego History, and AHA Perspectives.

     I am author of The San Diego World’s Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940 (University of New Mexico Press, 2005), a finalist for the San Diego Book Award. My reviews have been published in American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Religion, Journal of American Ethnic History, Pacific Historical Review, Western American Literature, Western Historical Quarterly, and New Mexico Historical Review. I have also consulted for the San Diego History Center and the National Building Museum in Washington DC for their exhibition Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), a 3-year traveling exhibition seen by 1.2 million people. I am currently working on a new book, entitled “Manic-Depressive Illness: An Intellectual History of Bipolar Disorder from Hippocrates to Biological Psychiatry,” and a novel entitled “Fishtown.”

      I am also a senior acquiring editor in scholarly publishing in the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Cultural Anthropology and Ethnography, History of Anthropology, Non-fiction of the American West, and Literary Memoir of the American West. I conceived the major, social science documentary project, The Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition (25 vols.) with my colleagues at work, and University of Western Ontario and the American Philosophical Society, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am a member of the publishing committee for International Publishers (New York, NY), first established in 1924.

    I play lead guitar in Red Cities (Lincoln, NE), a garage punk band on Modern Peasant Records, whose records are in regular rotation on KALX (Berkeley), WKDU (Philadelphia), and WFMU (Jersey City) among others. The Big Takeover Magazine said of Red Cities: “On breakneck blasters like ‘Worker Song’ and ‘Come Now Baby,’ Red Cities’ unashamedly summon slashing ‘Search and Destroy’ simulating riffs – tension-building, jet engine-explosive punk that exhilarates.” I am also a producer for Modern Peasant Records, having sponsored The Sinners’ Drunk on the Lord’s Day (MPR-013) and John Wayne’s Bitches’ Bitched Out (MPR-011). I blog about the history of punk rock, hardcore, and indy rock at the music podcast Doc Rockavoy’s Indy Music Garage.