Matthew Bokovoy

Professional Interests

Recent Commons Activity

About

I am senior acquiring editor 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 University of Nebraska Press, Regna Darnell of University of Western Ontario, and Martin Levitt of American Philosophical Society, funded by $2.5 million CAD from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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 such as the Journal of the American Planning Association, Reviews in American History, AHA Perspectives, and the New Mexico Historical Review. 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 am currently working on a new book, entitled “Manic-Depressive Illness: An Intellectual History of Bipolar Disorder from Hippocrates to Biological Psychiatry.”

I play lead guitar in Red Cities (Lincoln, NE), a garage punk band on Modern Peasant Records. The Big Takeover Magazine said: “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.

Education

Ph.D., History, 1999: Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122.

Dissertation: “San Diego’s Expositions as ‘Islands on the Land,’ 1915, 1935: Southwestern Culture, Race, and Class in Southern California.”
Directors: Allen F. Davis and Miles Orvell

Major Fields: 19th and 20th Century U.S. Social and Cultural History; American Studies; U.S. West/Spanish Borderlands; Public History; Urban History; Race and Ethnicity.

Minor Fields: American Literature and Literary History; History of Education and Pedagogy; Material Culture; Historiography; Popular Culture; History of Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Europe.

B.A. History, 1991: University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064.

Senior Thesis: “The Architecture of Democracy and Socialism: Frank Lloyd Wright, Alice Constance Austin, and the Search for Community in Early Twentieth Century Architecture.”
Advisors: John Homer Schaar and Steven Rugare

Coursework: United States History; Political and Social Theory

High School Diploma, 1987: Coronado High School, Coronado, CA 92118.
Class Rank: 6th in class.

Blog Posts

CV

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Publications

Books

The San Diego World’s Fairs and Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).

Journal Articles and Other Publications

“Scholarly Publishing and Social Provision,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014, commissioned but publication was institutionally censored. Available at http://www.mattbokovoy.com

“Spectres of Social Housing, San Diego-1935,” in Laura Schiavo and Robert Rydell, ed., Designing Tomorrow: America’s World’s Fairs of the 1930s, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 159-175.

“Brad Hayes: Master of the Mechanic Arts,” foreword for Brad Hayes, But I Did (Lulu Publishing, 2010). This is an art publication.

“City Beautiful: Balboa Park and the San Diego Expositions,” AHA Perspectives 47, no. 7 (October 2009).

“A New Historical Narrative for San Diego,” Roundtable on Mike Davis, Kelly Mayhew, and Jim Miller, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (New York: The New Press, 2003), Journal of San Diego History 55, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter/Spring 2009): 63-66.

“Strange Species: The Boomer University Intellectual.” Review of Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual, (New York: Basic Books, 2006), Reviews in American History 35, no. 2 (June 2007): 297-306.

“The Panama-California Exposition, 1915-1916,” in John Findling and Kimberly Pelle, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851-1988, 2nd Edition, (Chapel Hill: McFarland Publishing Company, 2007), 222-227.

“The California Pacific-International Exposition, 1935-1936” in John Findling and Kimberly Pelle, ed., Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851-1988, 2nd Edition, (Chapel Hill: McFarland Publishing Company, 2007), 282-287.

“Ghosts of the San Diego Rialto,” in Jim Miller, ed., Sunshine/Noir: Writings from San Diego and Tijuana, (San Diego: San Diego City Works Press, 2005), 76-85.

“Merle Eugene Curti, 1897-1996,” in The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 2005).

“‘The Peers of Their White Conquerors’: The San Diego Expositions and Modern Spanish Heritage in the Southwest, 1880-1940,” New Mexico Historical Review, 78, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 387-418

“The Federal Housing Administration and the ‘Culture of Abundance’ at the San Diego California-Pacific International Exposition of 1935-1936,” The Journal of the American Planning Association 68, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 371-386.

Guest Editor and author, “Humanist Sentiment, Modern Spanish Heritage, and California Mission Commemoration, 1769-1915,” Journal of San Diego History, 48, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 177-203.

“Inventing Agriculture in Southern California,” Journal of San Diego History, 44, no. 2, (Spring 1999): 66-85.

“Public Memory and Urban Landscapes: Rethinking Working Class Spatial Praxis in Urban Cultural History,” Theory@Buffalo.edu, 1, no. 1, (Summer 1995): 89-103.

Book Reviews

* I ceased academic reviews in January 2011 due to feelings of conflict of interest *

Review of James Gilbert, Whose Fair?: Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (December 2010): 825-26.

Review of Sarah Schrank, Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) Western Historical Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 239.

Review of Laura Hernández-Ehrisman, Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008) American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (April 2009): 455-56.

Review of Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 2 (May 2009): 285-287.

Review of Lawrence R. Samuel, The End of the Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), Journal of American History 95, no. 2 (September 2008): 604.

Film Review: Garrett Scott and Ian Olds, Cul-du-Sac: A Suburban War Story (San Diego: Subdivision Productions, 2002), Journal of San Diego History 54, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 316-317.

Review of Phoebe Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2007): 1312-13.

Review of Martin Padget, Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), Journal of San Diego History 53, no. 1 (Winter 2007).

Review of Victoria Dye, All Aboard for Santa Fe: Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), New Mexico Historical Review 82, no. 1 (Winter 2007).

Review of William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) Journal of San Diego History 52, nos. 1 & 2 (Winter/Spring 2006).

Review Essay: Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Journal of San Diego History, 51, no. 4 (Winter 2005).

Review of John Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s-1930s, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), Journal of American Ethnic History 25, no. 1 (Fall 2005).

Review of Hal Rothman, ed., The Culture of Tourism, the Tourism of Culture: Selling the Past to the Present in the American Southwest, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), New Mexico Historical Review, 80, no. 2 (Spring 2005).

Review of David Wrobel, Promised Lands: Promotion, Memory, and the Creation of the American West, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), Western American Literature, 39, no. 3 (Fall 2004).

Review of David Wrobel and Patrick Long, ed., Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001), New Mexico Historical Review,
78, no. 3 (July 2003): 339-340.

Review of William A. McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), New Mexico Historical Review, 77, no. 4 (Fall 2002), 472-473.

Review of Nancy Shoemaker, American Indian Population Recovery in the Twentieth Century, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), H-NET: Indian, (March 2002).

Review of Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Journal of San Diego History, 46, no. 2, (Spring 2001): 220-223.

Review of Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of the Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, trans. by Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, Richard K. Danford, (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), The Journal of Religion, 81, no. 1 (January 2001): 121-123.

Review of Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster & David Wyatt, Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California, Journal of San Diego History, 44, no. 2, (Spring 1999): 115-118.

Projects

Project Originator: The Franz Boas Papers, 25 vols., with Regna Darnell, University of Western Ontario, and Martin Levitt, American Philosophical Society, from Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2013-2020 – – $2,500,000.

Project Originator: Recovering Languages and Literacies in the Americas, with Donna Shear and Heather Lundine, University of Nebraska Press, from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – award $769,000

Participant Press, “Early American Places,” with University of Georgia Press and New York University Press, from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – $250,000.

Upcoming Talks and Conferences

“New Mexico’s Native Peoples and the Panama-California International Exposition, 1915-1916,” Museum of New Mexico Symposium on Native Peoples and the Fred Harvey Company/Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, November 2-4, 2018. Invited by Stephen Fried (Columbia University School of Journalism)

Senior Editor

University Of Nebraska Press