SCOPE Brown Bag Seminar

Al Camarillo is the Leon Sloss Jr. Memorial Professor and Professor of American History and Special Assistant to the Provost for Faculty Diversity in charge of the Faculty Development Initiative of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He was born and raised in the South Central Los Angeles community of Compton. After attending Compton public schools, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles as a freshman in 1966.

He continued his education at UCLA in the Ph.D. program in U.S. history where he received his doctorate in 1975 and where his dissertation was nominated that year as one of the best Ph.D. theses in the nation in American history. Camarillo was appointed to the faculty in the Department of History at Stanford University in 1975, a position he still holds. He has published seven books and more than three dozen articles and essays dealing with the experiences of Mexican Americans and other racial and immigrant groups in American cities.

Over the course of his career, Camarillo has received many awards and fellowships. Awards for research and writing include a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship; he was also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Stanford Humanities Center. His awards for teaching are also numerous. He is the only Faculty member in the history of Stanford University to receive the three highest awards for excellence in teaching and service to undergraduate education. At Stanford’s Commencement in 1988 and in 1994, respectively, he received the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for Outstanding Service to Undergraduate Education and the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 1997, he was awarded the Bing Teaching Fellowship Award for Excellence and Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching. Most recently, Camarillo was awarded the Miriam Roland Prize for Volunteer Service for 2005, an award that recognizes a Stanford faculty member who “over and above their normal academic duties engage and involve students in integrating academic scholarship with significant volunteer service to society.”