Catherine Gudis is Director of the Public History Program at UCR and teaches classes in public history and 20th century U.S. history, building on her twin interests in modern consumer culture and cultural and urban constructions of race, space, and place. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from Smith College and Ph.D. in American Studies (with distinction) from Yale University, where she also won the Yale Teaching Prize. Professor Gudis is the author of Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Cultural Landscape (Routledge, 2004), which traces the relationship between automobility, advertising, and the commercialization of the urban environment.For more than 20 years, Gudis has worked as a curator and consultant to art and history museums and in the field of historic preservation. Recent exhibitions she curated include “Geographies of Detention: From Guantánamo to the Golden Gulag” (with Molly McGarry) at the UCR California Museum of Photography (June-September 2013); “Junípero Serra and the Legacies of the California Missions” (with Steve Hackel) at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens (August 2013-January 2014; and “Deborah Sussman Loves Los Angeles!” (with Barbara Bestor) at the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urbanism’s WUHO Gallery, Los Angeles (2014).