Genevieve Carpio is an Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research examines how communities of color engage place-making practices and spatial movement within and against the infrastructures that shape everyday life. She is also active in the public humanities and is  an interdisciplinary scholar trained in American Studies and Ethnicity, Urban Planning, and Historic Preservation.

 

Her award-winning book, Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019), examines how diverse settler and migrant groups negotiated racial hierarchies through their movement in Southern California’s Inland Empire during the twentieth century. In this work, she bridges ethnic studies and geographic frameworks, building on what has been called the “new mobilities paradigm” to argue that in California, mobility is a key modality through which people live and contest race.

 

Her current project extends this focus on mobility by examining the racialized geographies of automotive insurance in California, including the history of redlining and the emergence of the "uninsured driver." This work examines how companies, government agencies, community activists, and everyday drivers have navigated insurance systems and their differing visions of risk and safety when on the move, offering new ways to understand how insurance shapes spatial inequity. 

 

In the public humanities, she works to unite academia and community organizations. Committed to public-facing scholarship, she publishes in both academic journals and national news outlets, including American Quarterly, Journal of American History,  Journal of Urban Affairs, Western Historical Quarterly, the Arcadia local history series, the Smithsonian, and the Washington Post, among other venues.

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Before joining UCLA's faculty, Carpio spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and the Program for Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. While working with public history organizations, she earned an M.A. in Urban Planning from UCLA and a graduate certificate in Historic Preservation from the USC School of Architecture. Her B.A. is in Anthropology from Pomona College.

 

Carpio is co-recipient of the 2024 Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship. She has also received the Hellman Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Grant, the Huntington Library Mauk and Nunis Fellowship, and two other Ford Foundation fellowships. In addition to her scholarly work, Carpio has been honored by the National Residence Hall Honorary for her work as a Faculty in Residence at UCLA, received multiple teaching awards, and was recognized as a PAGE Fellow by Imagining America, a consortium of universities dedicated to public engagement.