He earned his Ph.D. at UCLA, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Stanford. He is the recipient of several awards, including a National Science Foundation CAREER grant and the Harold J. Plous Award for UCSB's most outstanding junior faculty member. Alagona is the author of more than three-dozen publications on the histories of land use, natural resource management, environmental politics, and ecological science in California and the American West--including After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California (UC Press, 2013).