Laura Pulido is the Collins Chair and Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Geography at the University of Oregon where she studies race, environmental justice, and cultural memory. Prior to moving to Oregon she taught at the University of Southern California for over 20 years. She has published six books, including Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (University of Arizona, 1996); Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (University of California, 2006); A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (with Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng) (University of California, 2012), and most recently she worked with Jordan Camp to posthumously complete Clyde Woods’s, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restoration in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia, 2017). She has received numerous honors, including the Cullum Geographical Medal from the American Geographical Society, the Presidential Achievement Award from the Association of American Geographers, as well as Ford and Guggenheim fellowships. Her current work on landscapes of historical commemoration is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Most of her research explores the relationship between race, place, and social and environmental processes. She has devoted much of her career to studying environmental racism, especially how ra