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His publications include work on term limits, the initiative process, voting by mail, reapportionment, campaign finance laws, the blanket primary, health care policy, and European Parliament elections. He is the author of Term Limits and the Dismantling of State Legislative Professionalism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), a co-author of Adapting to Term Limits: Recent Experiences and New Directions (Public Policy Institute of California, 2004), a co-editor of The New Political Geography of California (Berkeley Public Policy Press, 2008), and a co-author of The Logic of American Politics, 4th Edition (Congressional Quarterly Press).

He is a recipient of the UC San Diego Academic Senate’s Distinguished Teaching Award, serves as co-editor of the journal State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and has worked as a staff assistant in the California, New Mexico, and United States Senates.

Marco Armiero (Ph.D. in Economic History) is an environmental historian, currently working as a Senior Researcher at the National Research Council, Italy. He is one of the founders of the environmental history field in Italy, authoring, among other works, the first Italian textbook on the subject.

His main topics of study have been the history of environmental conflicts over property rights and access to common resources (forests and sea), the politics of nature and landscape in Italian-nation building, and the environmental history of mass migrations. In English, he has published several essays and edited the book Views from the South. Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World (19th -20th cent.) in 2006. In the next few months the Ohio University Press will release his edited book “Nature and History in Modern Italy”.

After two short periods of research at the University of Kansas and Brown University, in the last years Marco has been working at the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, at the Environmental Science, Policy and Management Department, UC Berkeley, and at The Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University, where he was a visiting scholar in 2007-2008.

Marco is now back at The Bill Lane Center thanks to a joint grant he has been awarded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the Italian Research Council. While at the Center, Marco will continue working on his project on the environmental effects of mass migrations, using as a case-study Italian immigration in the US West. Marco will conduct extensive research in the Stanford Libraries, as well as in other Californian Libraries and Archives, searching for sources on the cultural-environmental exchange between the new-comers and nature. Marco is also planning to organize a workshop on immigrants and environment in frontier regions, hoping to produce a collection of comparative essays on this topic.

Michael De Alessi has joined the Bill Lane Center as the project director for "The Rural West" an innovative and creative effort to use iMapData and other digital and spatial data sources to map and analyze historical changes in the rural West, and work with journalists and academic collaborators to light a fire under scholarly and public discussion of important issues affecting the rural West, from health and health care, to education and the environment. The baseline for this study is the Report of the Country Life Commission that Teddy Roosevelt transmitted to Congress in 1909 — this year marks the centennial. Michael completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management at UC Berkeley this year, with a dissertation examining the environmental history, politics, and economics of fisheries policy in New Zealand. He also has an M.A. in Marine Policy from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami, as well as an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering and a B.A. in Economics from Stanford.

Kevin Hearle received his A.B. in English from Stanford in 1980 and his Master of Fine Arts from the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa in 1983 in poetry, and received a Masters (1990) and a Ph.D. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz in 1991.

His first book, Each Thing We Know Is Changed Because We Know It, and Other Poems (Boise: Ahsahta Press of Boise State University, 1994, 1996 & 2006) was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Poems from that book have been reprinted in numerous anthologies, from California to England.

Hearle was the revision editor for the 2nd edition of The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism (New York: Viking, 1997), co—editor of Beyond Boundaries: Rereading John Steinbeck (Tuscaloosa: U Alabama P, 2002), and the editor of The Essential Mary Austin (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2006). He has been a founding member of the editorial boards of The Steinbeck Newsletter, Steinbeck Studies and The Steinbeck Review, and has been an adjunct faculty member at: UC Santa Cruz, San Jose State, Cal State L.A., Santa Clara University and five other colleges and universities. In 2005, Kevin received the Burkhardt Award from Ball State University as the Outstanding Steinbeck Scholar of the year. He has also been one of the voices for the California Legacy Series Radio Anthology (californialegacy.org) at Santa Clara University since that program's inception.

Kevin is writing a book manuscript with the working title Of Race and Men: Race, Ethnicity and Eugenics in the Life and Works of John Steinbeck. He will be building on his previously published essays on miscegenation in The Pastures of Heaven and eugenics in The Grapes of Wrath and Their Blood Is Strong to consider the importance of race and ethnicity in Steinbeck's life and its centrality in much of his literary work.

Simon Maurano is a Ph.D. student in Geography of Development at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale." He will be working with Marco Armiero this fall. Simon's work focuses on waste management and environmental conflicts in Naples. While visiting the Center, Simon will be researching the larger context of these local conflicts in the field of environmental justice.