Phoebe S. K. Young teaches and writes about the cultural and environmental history of the modern United States and the American West. Her first book, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (University of California Press, 2006), examined public memories of the Spanish past, the built environment, regional development, and race relations in Southern California between the 1880s and the 1930s. She is currently working on a book for Oxford University Press on the history of camping and sleeping outside that explores the meanings and politics of nature in American culture. Two recent articles draw upon this research: “Wilderness Wives and Dishwashing Husbands: Comfort and the Domestic Arts of Camping Out, 1880-1910,” Journal of Social History, Fall 2009; and “Sleeping Outside: The Political Natures of Urban Camping,” Cities in Nature: Urban Environments of the American West, edited by Char Miller (University of Nevada Press, 2009). She has received fellowships from the Henry E. Huntington Library, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Council of Learned Societies, which awarded her the Oscar Handlin Fellowship for 2010.