Professor Carpio's research and teaching interests include race-making between diverse groups, how people make meaning in the places they call home, and the public humanities, particularly as related to the California Inland Empire and the digital world.

 

Carpio is the author of a book on racial formation in the multiracial suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire entitled Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019). She has also published in American Quarterly, Journal of American History, Journal of Urban Affairs, Western Historical Quarterly, Casden Annual Review, Boom California, the Arcadia local history series, and Information, Communication and Society, among other venues. She currently serves on the editorial board of Geohumanities, a journal of the American Association of Geographers, and as a reviewer for several academic journals. 

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Carpio is an interdisciplinary trained scholar who holds a doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. She also holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Pomona College, an M.A. in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a graduate certificate in Historic Preservation from the USC School of Architecture. Before joining UCLA, Carpio was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and the Program for Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University.

 

She is the recipient of two Ford Foundation Fellowships, the Hellman Fellowship, and the UCLA Faculty Career Development Award. She has also received a USC Provost Fellowship and recognition as PAGE Fellow by Imagining America, a consortium of universities dedicated to public engagement.