West. Her research emphasizes twentieth-century urban social reform movements; her first book, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (2011), focused on collaborative civil rights activism among Jewish, Mexican, African, and Japanese Americans in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a project on environmental health reform in twentieth-century California. She is a former Public Voices Fellow with Northwestern's OpEd Project and a former Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Latino studies, also at Northwestern. Before joining the Northwestern faculty, she was an associate professor of history at Southwestern University.