David Torres-Rouff is Associate Professor at the University of California Merced. His work explores the connections between people and place in the United States during the nineteenth century. He is the author of Before L.A.: Race, Space, and Municipal Power in Los Angeles, 1781-1895 (Yale, 2013) and is currently working on two projects. One explores American Chinese spatial practices in nineteenth-century California and another (West of Jim Crow) chronicles systems of segregation and exclusion in the US West during the 1800s. He holds a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara.
I am a student of social relations, public policy, migration, and urban life in the United States and beyond during the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, I study comparative racial and ethnic histories of Indigenous, Latina/o, African, Asian, and European Americans. Within that broad framework, I examine racial formation, transnationalism, and the development of cities and the communities of people who live in them. I am also steeped in the analysis of racial formation as the product of both individual and collective action as social, political, and spatial projects.
