Catherine Gudis is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in public history, historic preservation, and 20th-century U.S. cultural history more generally. She received a B.A. in philosophy from Smith College and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, and has held teaching posts at the Yale School of Architecture, the University of Connecticut, Northern Illinois University, and the University of Oklahoma Honors College. Gudis has worked for many years as an editor, curator, and public historian for art and history museums nationwide. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, she was director of education at the Los Angeles Conservancy where, among other outreach programs, she realized the large-scale, multimedia project entitled Curating the City: Wilshire Boulevard. Gudis’ book, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (Routledge, 2004), traces the relationship between automobility, advertising, and the commercialization of the urban environment. It starts in cities such as New York then hits the open road, examining the aesthetics and cultural politics of the roadside environment of the automobile age that leaders such as Albert Bard and his emissaries played a hand in reforming. She is currently working on two projects that, like Buyways, explore the nexus of aesthetics, commercial culture, and the built environment. One is on the role of visual culture in defining popular perceptions of California, and the other, a book-length study entitled To Market, to Market, examines distribution in the age of the logo, cargo container, and big box store, pondering the impact of mass consumerism on the built and natural environments.