Category Archives: Member of the Week

Member of the Week

Member of the Week: Peter Siskind

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Siskind headshot 6 17Peter Siskind, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor & Chair, Department of Historical & Political Studies, Arcadia University

Executive Director, Urban History Association

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? 

I’ve been exploring the politics of development in the cities, suburbs, and recreational vacationlands of the post-World War II northeast corridor from Boston to Washington, D.C. for quite a while now. I have lived most of my life on the northeast corridor, and I’ve long been fascinated by how multiple, often competing popular calls for land-use reform interact with fractured structures of metropolitan governments to produce such ambiguous, often dissatisfying policy results.

Describe what you are currently teaching. How does your teaching relate to your scholarship?

I teach a variety of courses on modern American politics and policy and the United States’ relationship with the world. A favorite theme that emerges from my work both in the archives and the classroom (with each influencing the other) is how implementation of policy frequently veers so far from executive and/or legislative intentions.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

I’ve been spending a lot of time with TP. Ho Chi Minh: Mega City (2016 – 3rd edition) following a trip I took to Vietnam with students in March. The book is mostly comprised of photography as well as short chapter introductions that collectively focus on recent, rapid growth and the ways the growth processes are affecting people, architecture and housing, urban transport, and the very soul of the city. The trip and the book have stimulated my curiosity about the extraordinary rate (and dizzying effects) of recent Asian urban growth (not something I’ve studied extensively before) and re-framed my thinking about American metropolitan growth and its discontents.

What advice do you have for young scholars preparing themselves for a career related to urban history or urban studies? 

I encourage scholars young and old to develop and sustain a strong scholarly network in the best sense of the word. When one has a network of people one likes and with whom one regularly engages academic interests then a whole range of personal satisfactions and professional accomplishments follow a lot more easily.

What are you looking forward to most as the new Executive Director of the Urban History Association?

I haven’t done such a great job in recent years of taking my own advice about sustaining a strong scholarly network; instead, I’ve focused a lot of energy on my home institution (Arcadia University). So I’m most looking forward to meeting many urban scholars and getting to know them and their work. And of course I’m also looking forward to helping the UHA’s Board of Directors accomplish the goals they establish for the organization.

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Member of the Week: Claudio Daflon

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20150531_104913Claudio Daflon

@claudiodaflon

Doctoral Candidate in History

University of Connecticut 

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? 

My dissertation is about the expansion of the national university system towards the metropolitan municipalities of the Gran Buenos Aires. It questions how this process relates to the urbanization and transformation processes experienced in the conurbano bonaerense in the last three decades. I depart from the idea that only politicians and state educational policies have been influential in this expansion; multiple, contradictory voices participated in historical developments that institutional agents certainly did not always expect. Apart from the dissertation, I’m also working with some colleagues on a project about samba music and citizenship in Rio de Janeiro.

Describe what you are currently teaching. How does your teaching relate to your scholarship?

I’m currently a teaching assistant at UConn. I have taught courses as different as Contemporary European History, Western Civilization, and the recent history of the United States. The experience of teaching different courses is enriching. I have been fortunate to have the liberty to relate some of my discussions to topics connected to my specific research.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

I strongly recommend one of my latest readings: Matthew Karush’s new book Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music. It narrates the transnational careers of some Argentinian artists, exploring themes such as popular culture, race, global cultural industry, and how they relate to Argentine national identity. I’m excited to start reading historian Jason Chang’s recent monograph Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880-1940, which investigates how racial discrimination against Chinese Mexicans played an important role in the revolutionary Mexican state nation-building process.

What advice do you have for young scholars preparing themselves for a career related to urban history or urban studies? 

In my experience, reading the most recent ‘classics’ of the field (whatever time and national scopes they cover) is a key step to developing the necessary skills to frame relevant questions for our own work.

What Brazilian city are tourists mistakenly leaving off their itinerary, and why do you recommend they visit it?

I’m very curious about Recife, the capital of the northeastern Pernambuco state. The city holds a long history of cultural encounters (that includes the occupation by the Dutch and the slave traffic that fed the sugar cane industry) and complex urban developments. I’m especially attracted by its effervescent popular culture, which combines many traditional folk expressions to very cosmopolitan influences. Recife is now a powerhouse in cinema, theater, and music; its nightlife is described as very vibrant, and its carnival as one of the best in Brazil. Sometimes overshadowed by the paradisiac beaches of the Brazilian Northeast, Recife is definitely a city that visitors should add to their travel plans.

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Member of the Week: Carmen C. M. Tsui

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Carmen Tsui_PhotoCarmen C. M. Tsui, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, City University of Hong Kong

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? 

Growing up in Hong Kong, I was always fascinated that such a tiny city can accommodate a population of 7 million people. Nevertheless, I have a fundamental concern with how the housing history has been written in China and Hong Kong, and this concern has led to two current research projects. The first project studies the origins of public housing in China. I wish to correct a common misconception that Communists invented public housing in China after 1949. My research traces the origin of public housing in China back to the Republican era in the 1920s and examines the state’s efforts to make housing a domain of the government. My second project studies philanthropic housing in Hong Kong from the 1950s to the 1960s. I challenge the official account that often describes the beginning of welfare housing in Hong Kong as a government response to resettle victims of a disastrous squatter fire in 1953. The project points out that, in fact, philanthropists invented welfare housing in Hong Kong, and these philanthropists had developed several housing estates for the local working class even before the official government public housing program.

Describe what you are currently teaching. How does your teaching relate to your scholarship?

I am teaching a lecture course on the history of architecture and urbanism, a seminar on architectural theory, and a studio course on architectural design. I hope that through a comparative global perspective, students can develop a critical eye in looking at China and Hong Kong. In my courses, I often challenge my students to think critically about whether Western urban and planning theories can be applied to China. For instance, while teaching the City Beautiful Movement developed around the 1900s in the United States, I analyze the ways that this movement impacted the city planning of early modern Chinese cities. When teaching the modernist planning ideas, I ask my students to compare the rationality and monotony of Le Corbusier’s planning models with their experience of the new towns in Hong Kong. By linking history and theory with familiar Chinese examples, my students are more engaged in learning when they see how history and theory link to familiar Chinese examples.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

I am currently reading Nancy Kwak’s A World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid. This book reveals how the ideal of homeownership was developed in the United States and further exported to the rest of the world. I am also happy to see several new books published recently on the architecture and urban history of Asian cities. These books include A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience by Jiat-Hwee Chang and Globalizing Seoul: The City’s Cultural and Urban Change by Jieheerah Yun.

What advice do you have for young scholars preparing themselves for a career related to urban history or urban studies? 

I think young scholars should set their career priorities and stay focused. Urban historians and scholars often have broad interests. We are curious about everything that is happening, or has happened, in the city. Nevertheless, it is hard to do everything at once. Sometimes, we need focus on the project at hand and be realistic about our working capacity.

What architectural details do you enjoy looking for when you’re exploring a new city?

I love visiting architecture made by the common people: traditional markets, street food stalls, and so forth. I am always intrigued by the vernacular wisdom in construction and the way architecture is woven into everyday life. I also like to visit historical buildings that have been adapted for contemporary uses.

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Member of the Week: Mauricio Castro

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MauricioMauricio Castro, PhD

@CastroHistorian

Postdoctoral Associate, Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South

Duke University

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? 

I am in the process of converting my dissertation, “Casablanca of the Caribbean: Cuban Refugees, Local Power, and Cold War Policy in Miami, 1959-1995,” into a book manuscript. Like many other people from Latin America, Miami was the first place I visited in the United States. I was six years old, learning to speak English, and I wanted to piece together a sentence or two that I could say to someone on my first trip to the U.S. I arrived in Miami with my parents to find that just about everyone I met spoke Spanish. For a long time, Miami seemed like an aberration. When I began to study the city as a graduate student, however, I found that the investment in the Cuban exile community following 1959 and its effect on the city made it fit within established models of Sunbelt political economy. Instead of making Miami an outlier, the Cuban presence in the city made it a fundamental, but often misunderstood, part of the history of American defense spending and its effect on metropolitan areas. The project kept evolving from there, becoming a study of Miami’s Cuban community and its interactions with other groups in the city. I spend a good deal of the manuscript tracing the development of local economic and political power and the influence this afforded the Cuban American community. I am fascinated by the way in which transnational events and trends shape local communities and how local developments can affect politics at an international level.

Describe what you are currently teaching. How does your teaching relate to your scholarship?

I am currently teaching a course entitled “Society, Culture, and Rock and Roll.” This is the second time I have taught this course after taking over for the dearly missed Michael Morrison. My approach to the course leans more heavily on urban history than Mike’s did. I use the development of several styles of popular music in the postwar period as a gateway to teaching students about suburbanization and the urban crisis. I am currently also developing a course for the fall entitled “Latinx Communities in the U.S.” This course will be largely focused on transnational migrations and the creation of Latino/a communities in different regions of the United States.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

I am currently very excited to read Llana Barber’s new monograph Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945–2000. Barber’s approach, combining the history of the urban crisis with the histories of American intervention in Latin America and the migrations they caused resonates with my own approach to Miami. This book is also part of an important trend in urban history that seeks to correct how we have largely conceived of Latino/a communities as existing in the largest of American cities. Barber’s book on Lawrence and other projects currently in development will be crucial to our understanding of the vastness of the Latino/a urban experience.

What advice do you have for young scholars preparing themselves for a career related to urban history or urban studies? 

I would say that young scholars should keep the stories of the cities they study in perspective. As urbanists we tend to focus on the local histories and what they can tell us about national trends. I would tell young scholars to question whether these stories end at the city limits or even at the country’s border. While histories that deals with immigration and cities is most obvious, I would suggest that young scholars seek out other ways in which every city is a global city. Only when we consider this perspective in tandem with more traditional approaches can we form a more complete understanding of these places.

What is your favorite fictional (literary, film, art, media) representation of Miami?

I have yet to find something that captures Miami in the way that something like a Raymond Chandler novel evokes Los Angeles, or how countless films have represented aspects of New York City. My favorite representation of Miami is probably ¿Qué Pasa, USA?, the bilingual PBS sitcom from the late 1970s. While it is played for laughs, the encounter between cultures that is such a vital part of the Miami experience is the heart of that show.

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Member of the Week: Alexia Yates

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Alexia YatesAlexia Yates

Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Department of History, University of Manchester

Also an affiliate at the Manchester Urban Institute and the Center for History and Economics, Harvard University

@alexia_yates

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? 

I’ve just finished an article that I’ve been working on for some time about the way people in nineteenth-century France – principally lawyers, bankers, legislators, and some ubiquitous anonymous pamphleteers – tried to understand and change the relationship between land and money. My current research is continuing to pursue the intersection of property, politics, and space that influenced my first book but turns to a study of how finance became a routine part of daily life for French people in the first age of global capital. It might not seem urban, but there’s a strong spatial component to the project: tracing how people conceive of national and international financial networks, as well as how local financial districts were constructed. Scale is a crucial element of the exploration – for example, the idea that the police at the Paris Stock Exchange might influence the international economy by regulating the distribution of seats on the exchange floor. Like many others working on the history of economic life, I am attracted to the task of interrogating and reconfiguring our ideas about how the economy works, about how the production, circulation, and redistribution of wealth is effected, and for me the spaces and stuff of economic practice are both crucial technologies and entry points.

Describe what you are currently teaching. How does your teaching relate to your scholarship? 

I’m lucky to work in a place that is so enthusiastic for European history. I’m currently teaching a first-year seminar on nineteenth-century Paris as the capital of modernity, which is a fun introduction to urban studies and European history for new history students. I’m also teaching a masters course on the Landscapes of Modernity, in which I really get to dig deep into urban theory across transnational case studies. (I also got to teach Nature’s Metropolis, which is such a pleasure to introduce to students.) Happily I get to work out the economic history side of things in a second-year survey on Crisis and Prosperity, which tackles twentieth-century European history from the perspective of economic change and inequality in the modern era. I hope to develop my new research with a special third-year seminar on property and wealth in transnational perspective soon.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

The list of new books about money, finance, and property awaiting me this summer is outstanding! I’m excited for Fahad Bishara’s Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1750-1840 (Cambridge, 2017), as well as Noam Maggor’s Brahmin Capitalism (Harvard, 2017). As for those recent ones I’m behind on, I’ve had both Rosemary Wakeman’s Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (Chicago, 2016) and Jacob Remes’s Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana, 2016) on my desk for too long, and Charles Maier’s Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Harvard, 2016) is getting a second read. Once those are out of the way, I’ll be ready for forthcoming works from Andrew Israel Ross, The Pleasures of Paris: Sex and Urban Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Michael Mulvey’s The Moral Moment: Catholics and the Housing Question in Postwar France, Pete Soppelsa’s Fragility of Urban Modernity on Parisian infrastructure, Catherine Clark’s Paris and the Cliché of History, as well as Desmond Fitz-Gibbon’s Particulars of Sale on the property market in nineteenth-century Britain.

What advice do you have for graduate students preparing a dissertation project related to urban history or urban studies?

Be comparative, move across scales, but stay locally embedded and make sure there are people in your story. Every history takes (and makes) place.

What’s your favorite street (or block) in Paris, and why?

Like choosing a favourite child. I’ll cut things short and say either the rue de Belleville or the rue de Ménilmontant – both are meandering, climbing above the city and making excellent routes to chase the sunset up through the streets; both take you through some of the sites of infamy of the Paris Commune (crossing the rue Haxo, in particular); and they end up nearly at the Archives de Paris, still one of my favourite places to work.

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Member of the Week: Barry Goldberg

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BG PicBarry Goldberg, Ph.D. (2017)

Department of History, CUNY Graduate Center

@bpg269

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?

My project examines Jewish politics on the Lower East Side since the 1960s. I utilize congressional and municipal papers, court records, articles from the ethnic press, and quantitative voting data to examine how an influential network of Jewish elected leaders, civic institutions, and voters – residing on Grand Street and largely Orthodox — shaped the trajectory of civil rights activism, new education and antipoverty policy, and urban renewal on the Lower East Side during the last third of the twentieth century. In all, I make three central claims: first, that the Lower East Side remained an important site for the development of, and ideological fissures within, American Jewish politics after World War II; second, that Jewish-Puerto Rican relations became a central feature of both local and citywide politics at this time; and third, that Orthodox Jews helped shape American conservatism in the postwar period.

I am broadly interested in questions of race, political power, and neighborhood change. I became interested in my specific topic after researching a longtime Jewish congressional representative on the Lower East Side. Though he was not the original subject of my research, he provided a gateway into looking at the neighborhood’s larger Jewish community. I was surprised to learn that no one had written a postwar history of this community, or Lower East Side politics more generally, despite several factors that set it apart from other urban neighborhoods. Recent high-profile stories on the neighborhood have also spurred my research, and, as the descendant of a Lower East Sider, I feel a certain emotional connection to the area.

Describe what you are currently teaching. How does your teaching relate to your scholarship?

I teach the second half of the U.S. history survey at Queens College. My research has led me to cover more local (primarily New York City) history in the survey. Earlier in the semester, my students learned about redlining by perusing the Mapping Inequality online database. We also talked about the 1964 Harlem Riots and debates over police brutality (I blogged briefly on this here).

At the same time, my dissertation has also made me more attuned to congressional history. In my dissertation, I examine Lower East Side redistricting and judicial debates over enforcing the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). As a result, I devote more time to discussing the VRA in class.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

Three in particular: Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics by Kim Phillips-Fein; In the Heat of the Summer: The New York Riots of 1964 and the War on Crime by Michael Flamm; Radical Imagination, Radical Humanity: Puerto Rican Political Activism in New York by Rose Muzio

What advice do you have for graduate students preparing a dissertation project related to urban history or urban studies?

I have two connected suggestions. First, keep an open mind. I had broad interests at the start of graduate school and did not expect to research the Lower East Side, or urban history more broadly. But here I am. Trial and error is OK. Be patient, and keep working. My second suggestion is to prioritize archival research. Obviously, you need to know what others have said about your topic (or potential topic), but the archives will lead you in new and exciting directions.

Describe your most exciting archival find!

One of my favorite archival finds was the Board of Election reports and assembly district maps from the New York Public Library. Using these in combination allowed me to trace how people voted in different sections of the Lower East Side and break those sections down by a number of social factors. This quantitative data allowed me to show how political divisions, primarily around race and ethnicity, unfolded on the ground in the neighborhood and provided a needed element of social history to my work.

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Member of the Week: Timothy Lombardo

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Profile PicTimothy J. Lombardo, PhD

Assistant Professor

Department of History, University of South Alabama

Twitter: @TimLombard0

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?

I am currently finishing my first book. It is a study of post-World War II Philadelphia and the blue-collar supporters of 1960s police commissioner turned 1970s mayor, Frank Rizzo. The book examines white, blue-collar Philadelphians’ engagement with the politics of law enforcement, education, employment, and housing and traces the establishment of an urban, class-conscious variant of populist conservatism. I came to the project for a number of reasons. The first is because I was born and raised in Philadelphia. I had long known of Rizzo’s reputation, but never really thought about it in a broader context until graduate school. I didn’t initially set out to write a dissertation on my home town, but I took a seminar on Conservatism in the Modern United States that piqued my interest. I also thought I recognized a gap in the literature. The majority of the urban history books we read in that seminar covered the Sunbelt or Suburban communities in the South and West (think Lisa McGirr, Becky Nicolaides, Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse, Robert Self, etc.). These were all great books, but they didn’t seem to account for the kinds of urban conservative politics I was familiar with at home. I quickly decided to change my dissertation topic and spent the next few years chasing resources from the white, working- and middle-class neighborhoods that provided Frank Rizzo with his most enthusiastic support. Years later, the book is now under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press under the title Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and the Politics of the Urban Crisis.

Describe what you are currently teaching. How does your teaching relate to your scholarship?

I just finished my second year at the University of South Alabama. In addition to my modern US survey courses, this past year I also taught a writing seminar on post-World War II US history and a research seminar on 20th century US History. In the next academic year I will offer an honors class on American urban history called “The Urban Crucible: Cities and Suburbs in Modern America” and another course on America in the Sixties. All of these classes relate to my scholarship in a number of ways. My post-1945 US, urban history, and Sixties classes all take up the intersecting themes of race, class, and American political development that I write about in my book. I also try to integrate bits of my research into every class I teach, from surveys to research seminars.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

Since you’ve already given me the space to make a shameless plug about my own book, I will say that I’m most looking forward to (finally) reading Ansley Erickson’s Making the Unequal Metropolis. It’s been on my to-read list for a while, but the recent controversy over the book’s treatment by the American Historical Review has reinvigorated my interest. I had actually chosen the book as one of my course readings in my upcoming urban history class well before the AHR review came out, so now I’m really looking forward to figuring out how I’m going to incorporate it into the class.

What advice do you have for young scholars preparing themselves for a career related to urban history or urban studies?

Be flexible. Be flexible with your research, with your reading, with your writing, and with your career path. Urban history/studies is a growing field with a lot of possibilities, but young scholars shouldn’t let it also be a limitation. I think the flexibility to read across specialties and disciplines, to publish in different forums, and to research beyond what we usually consider urban history are important parts of scholarly development and maturation. I didn’t start out doing urban history; my research took me in that direction. It also helps to be flexible in where young scholars think they can do urban history. I’m pretty sure there was never a point when I was growing up in Philly, or at any point thereafter, that I told myself that I wanted to end up in Mobile, Alabama. But I remained open to different possibilities and followed them when they opened up. Now I’m lucky to be forging a career at a good university, with great students, and excellent colleagues.

What museum or historical site would you recommend to urban historians visiting Mobile, Alabama?

First of all, more urban historians need to visit Mobile, Alabama, where I’d be happy to show them around when they get here! We have a really good museum in the History Museum of Mobile. For those interested in the city’s architecture, I would direct them to some of Mobile’s historic neighborhoods like the Oakleigh Garden District, De Tonti Square, and Church Street East Historic District. I would suggest they visit Africatown, which is the community built by the last group of African slaves captured and brought to the United States, illegally smuggled in through Mobile Bay in 1860. And, finally, I wouldn’t want an urban scholar to leave without touring Mobile’s lively and growing downtown entertainment district. Like a lot of cities, Mobile’s downtown suffered from disinvestment and decline in the late 20th century, but a concentrated effort in the last decade or so began rejuvenating the area. Current planning documents call for future redevelopment that should allow for more walkability, bikeability, and green spaces. All in all, downtown Mobile offers urban scholars and students an excellent opportunity to see urban renewal in action.

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Member of the Week: Nichole Nelson

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Summertime Facebook Profile PhotoNichole Nelson

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of History, Yale University

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?

My dissertation examines how communities that choose to intentionally racially integrate in order to increase property values can serve as potential models to achieve racial residential integration nationwide. The methods that small, suburban communities have adopted in the aftermath of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s missed opportunity to achieve integration during George Romney’s tenure as HUD Secretary from 1969-1973 are strategies that other communities and the federal government can emulate.

I became interested in studying racially integrated communities both as a result of my personal experience and pure coincidence. Having grown up in Levittown, New York as one of 500 black residents out of a town of approximately 50,000 people, I always wondered if my experience was normal. It wasn’t until I attended college at the University of Pennsylvania and took history courses that I learned that my hometown—Levittown—was intentionally segregated both through federal policy and real estate developer William Levitt’s reluctance to sell homes to black people. Taking classes with Thomas Sugrue piqued my interest in learning about racial residential segregation as well as integrated communities, like the communities that Morris Milgram planned and integrated.

However, when I was working on a seminar paper that informed half of my M.A. Thesis at Vanderbilt, I started on the path to my current research. Then, I was interested in studying the lives and experiences of black suburbanites who resided in white, working-class and middle-income suburbs from the 1970s through the 2000s. I wasn’t sure of many communities with this history, but I called Thomas Sugrue for advice and he made me aware of two communities with that particular history. Upon doing further research, I was surprised to learn about communities intentionally integrating, given the government, real estate industry, and white homeowners’ investment in racially segregated communities. From there, my research interests slowly shifted to their current manifestation.

Describe what you are currently teaching. How does your teaching relate to your scholarship?

I’m not currently teaching, but I had the pleasure of serving as a Teaching Assistant for David Blight’s course The Civil War & Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 last spring. The texts that we used to teach students about Reconstruction, Redemption, and the Compromise of 1877 illuminate how, for a brief moment, there was an alternative to the rigidly defined system of white supremacy that pervades American society today, with several black men holding office and local, bi-racial governments populating the South. Although seemingly different from the history that I study, this notion of alternatives is something that I’m interested in–as someone who believes that the methods that racially integrated communities have employed to maintain diversity can serve as important alternatives to the racial residential segregation that pervades American society.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

I’m interested in reading more from Destin Jenkins, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard, who writes about racial capitalism and post-war San Francisco. I’m also interested in reading more from Anthony Pratcher, a doctoral candidate at Penn, who writes about the relationship between taxation and the de-valuation of bodies of color in Phoenix, Arizona.

What advice do you have for graduate students preparing a dissertation project related to urban history or urban studies?

I would definitely advise graduate students to try to maintain a close working relationship with their advisor. I have been fortunate to have fantastic advisors who have been very attentive and kind with their feedback at every stage of my academic career, from Stephanie McCurry who advised me at Penn, Gary Gerstle, my advisor at Vanderbilt, and my advisor at Yale, Glenda Gilmore. They have all been fantastic and have offered invaluable feedback.

I am fortunate to have an advisor like Glenda Gilmore, who provides line edits of my dissertation chapters and is very encouraging; I would recommend seeking out an advisor who will do the same for you. As urban historians, especially twentieth century urban historians, we can often times get overwhelmed by the number of sources associated with studying our particular time period. A great advisor can help you parse out the story that you’re trying to tell.

What recommendation do you have for the profession of urban history?

When I often think of my favorite works of urban history, the classics (Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Kenneth Jackson, Thomas Sugrue, etc.) are usually written by white men. However, when I think of works of urban sociology, the works tend to be more diverse, and names like W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Pattillo, Bruce Haynes, and Sudhir Venkatesh come to mind. Unfortunately, there are few black urban historians that come to mind, like Nathan Connolly. My perception is that Sociology seems to be more diverse than History, and given that urban history largely involves the study of people of color who reside in urban environments, it would be wonderful if the Urban History Association could take the lead on creating a pipeline to for tomorrow’s faculty of color by creating a dissertation completion grant for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous graduate students and a grant for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous junior faculty.

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Member of the Week: Robert Fairbanks

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Photo #2Robert B. Fairbanks, PhD

University of Texas at Arlington

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?

I am currently researching the growth of the so-called suburban cities of the Southwest. One of the hallmarks of modern metropolitan America after World War II is the growth of huge suburban cities. Currently, Mesa, Arizona, is the 38th largest “city” in America while Arlington, Texas, is the 50th largest “city.” Although neither has the look or feel of a traditional city, both of these share many of the characteristics associated with modern cities including a diverse population, numerous manufacturing plants, large office buildings, massive retail outlets, cultural institutions and serious traffic problems. Some suburban cities may have started out as small rural towns on the fringe of the city, or possibly emerged as bedroom suburbs after World War II, but from my study of North Texas suburbs it became clear that some civic leaders in these communities had larger visions for creating a new type of city in metropolitan America. Although big city spillover explains the growth of suburban cities to some degree, these places became more than “accidental cities” due to civic leadership that embraced planning, boosterism and aggressive annexation that would result in a new type of city. I was drawn to this topic because I have lived and taught at the university here in Arlington for over 35 years and have become curious about why it and places like it in the Southwest developed the way they did. Were they merely accidental, as Robert Beauregard has suggested, or something more? Moreover, since neither Mesa nor Arlington has attracted the kind of scholarly attention they deserve I thought these suburban cities deserved some a closer look and believe that such a study would contribute to a better understanding of larger trends in the history of the metropolitan Southwest.

Describe what you are currently teaching. How does your teaching relate to your scholarship?

I currently teach an upper division undergraduate course entitled Cities and Suburbs in U.S. American History. I have been able to integrate my previous research in the history of housing reform, urban renewal and urban politics in the Southwest to the course and to provide more attention to the history of the urban Southwest, the focus of my scholarship, than one would expect at a Midwestern university. I also teach a Colloquium in Transatlantic urban history at the graduate level that draws less from my actual research and more from the background reading in this new field. Although I am not teaching the History of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex this semester, I do regularly offer this class as a case study of urban history and rely heavily on my research on Dallas and now Fort Worth for that class which includes lectures, readings and field trips to both Dallas and Fort Worth.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

I am very pleased that Temple University Press has now published my book, The War On Slums in the Southwest, in paperback because this allows it to be used in courses and to reach a wider audience.   Although I focus on the various efforts to eradicate slums in five Southwestern cities from the 1930s to the 1960s, a topic previously little studied, the book is more than a regional study and I hope my conceptual approach which traces how the war on slums gives way to the war on poverty will have some impact on how we think about federal policy in this area.

What advice do you have for young scholars preparing themselves for a career related to urban history or urban studies?

I would encourage young scholars in graduate school to develop networks within and without the university. It is so important to share your research with others and not only have them read what you write but for you to read what they have written and learn from them. Attendance at conferences can be pricey but the ability to interact with one’s peers from across the country as well as meet more established scholars is important professionally because many of these people will become life-long friends. Finally, you should select a research topic that really interests you since you will be spending a lot of time focused on it.

What museum or historical site would you recommend to urban historians visiting the city where you live?

Although the Sixth Floor Museum, which retells the story of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, is tasteful and evocative for those who lived through it, my recommendation is go to the nearby Old Red Museum of Dallas County History and Culture. Located in the beautifully restored Old Red County Courthouse built in 1892 in the oldest section of Dallas, the museum includes four galleries that present the chronological history of the city using historical artifacts, as well as various touch screen computers, an educational learning center, and four theaters that run well-crafted 15-minute films for each section.

Member of the Week

Member of the Week: Kenvi Phillips

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kenvi RadKenvi Phillips, PhD

Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University

Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?

Among the topics I am currently interested in is the Colored Y Campaign lead by Rev. Jesse E. Moorland in the early 20th century. The efforts of the national and local YMCA offices, local communities, and the Rosenwald Fund acquired enough money to have more than 20 YMCA buildings built for African American men across the country. The construction of these buildings helped to shape urban space and opportunities for its members. I first became interested in Moorland and the Young Men’s Christian Association a few years ago while I was working at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. There I came across one of Moorland’s scrapbooks from the St. Louis campaign. In the book was a photo of the organizing committee on an urban block with which I was unfamiliar. As a native of St. Louis, I thought that I was aware of all of the city’s neighborhoods, but this photo introduced me to an entire community that I had heard of in passing but had never before seen. These organizations through these buildings transformed both the physical and metaphysical landscape for African American men in urban centers across the country.

Describe what you are currently curating. How does this work relate to your scholarship?

I am the Curator for Race and Ethnicity at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University. As a curator I am working to expand one of the nation’s best collections on American women to be more inclusive. This means exploring communities, organizations and individuals that have been traditionally overlooked and underrepresented in archives and subsequently in scholarship. Uncovering the lives and stories of underrepresented women, many of them from or influential in urban communities across the nation, is critical to understanding the development of the American city as well as the suburb. Curators and collections managers are constantly uncovering and sometimes rediscovering past people and events that alter our understanding of American culture. Additionally, through our collecting we get to influence the direction of future research and scholarship. Women that we encounter today whose stories we archive, via oral histories, diaries, correspondence, publications and more will be the subject of current and future research.

What recent or forthcoming publications are you excited about, either of your own or from other scholars?

Cheryl Knott’s Not Free, Not For All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow, and Daphne Spain’s Constructive Feminism: Women’s Spaces and Women’s Rights in the American City.

What advice do you have for young scholars preparing themselves for a career related to urban history or urban studies?

I would advise young scholars interested in both public and academic tracks not to be dismayed by the broadening of their professional interests because all things are related. A course that you teach on Second Wave feminism or an exhibition that you need to develop on 19th century cooking can and should be influenced by urban history. Making those connections often times will ignite your passion for urban history allowing you to make it more accessible to wider audiences.

What texts or readings would you recommend on the topic of your research?

There are not that many secondary sources that cover the history of the colored YMCA. There are quite a few Progressive era texts and primary source materials that I use. However, Nina Mjagkij has done an awesome job with the following two titles: Light in the Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1852-1946, and the book she co-authored with Margaret Ann Spratt, Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and YWCA in the City.