Dr. Carol Lynn McKibben is an Affiliate Scholar and Lecturer for the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University and has been teaching courses in California history, Urban history and Immigration history for the Department of History and Urban Studies at Stanford University since 2006. Her recent book, SALINAS: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City was published in January 2022, Stanford University Press.

Dr. McKibben has engaged in numerous community-based research projects on the Monterey Peninsula for thirty years.  

Her first book, Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, 1915-1999 placed women at the center of a transnational migration story that focused on the ways migration re-shaped Sicilian fishing families as they moved back and forth from villages in Sicily to Monterey, California and, at the same time, altered the character of the city over the course of the twentieth century.

Dr. McKibben served as Director of the Seaside History Project from 2005-2012. Her second book, Racial Beachhead: Diversity and Democracy in a Military Town (Stanford University Press, 2012) showed how federal investment and diversity of personnel stationed at nearby Fort Ord transformed a small community, Seaside, into an important center of civil rights activism in California. 

From 2016-2021 Dr. McKibben served as director of the Salinas History Project. She published her third book SALINAS: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City (Stanford University Press) in 2022. She tells the story of "the Salad Bowl of the World" as a complex story of community-building in a multiracial, multiethnic city where diversity has been a cornerstone of civic identity. Dr. McKibben's scholarship is based on extensive original research, including oral histories and never-before-seen archives of local business groups, tracing Salinas's ever-changing demographics and the challenges and triumphs of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants, as well as Depression-era Dust Bowl migrants and white ethnic Europeans. McKibben takes us from Salinas's nineteenth-century beginnings as the economic engine of California's Central Coast up through the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color today, especially farmworkers who already live on the margins.

She is currently engaged in a new book project: Water Politics in an Age of Drought on the Central Coast of California, which is part of a larger project at Stanford's Bill Lane Center on Environment and the West .