Natalia Molina is an American historian and Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Fit To Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts, and A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community. In 2019, Molina co-edited a series of essays on the formation of race in the United States, Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice, in collaboration with Daniel Martínez Hosang and Ramón Gutiérrez. She has also published numerous articles in scholarly journals and contributes op-eds in nationally circulated newspapers. She received a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship for her work on race and citizenship. Molina is currently serving as the Interim Director of Research at The Huntington Library. Education and employment Molina received her B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles and double-majored in History and Women's Studies. She later received and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, after which she joined the University of California, San Diego faculty. After earning tenure and serving in various faculty and administrative roles at UCSD, in 2018 she joined the faculty of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California in 2018. Research Molina studies the intersections of race, gender, culture, and citizenship. Her scholarship has been described as "an exciting contribution to the growing body of scholarship that knits the history of medicine and public health more tightly into the fabric of the American past..." and as making an “important contribution to the literature on the histories of public health, race, labor, and urban planning by demonstrating the magnitude of public health officials‘ influence on city policy and planning and on the development of racial hierarchies”. In 2007, Molina won the PCB-American Historical Association's Norris and Carol Hundley Award for her first book, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939. Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940 (2006) How Race Is Made in America (2013) Molina's 2013 book How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts examines Mexican immigration to the United States. Focusing on the years between 1924-1965, Molina argues that during this time period an immigration regime emerged that would