My work examines the cultural, intellectual, and urban history of the United States in the 20th century. I am interested in the interrelations between ideas, culture, and politics and I am currently at work on two projects: a study of Wendell Willkie, popular internationalism, empire, and race during World War II and a long term investigation of the relations between "selfhood" and metropolitan form.

My first book was a new look at urban renewal in postwar Manhattan and I have also published an edited collection of the essays of the urbanist Jane Jacobs.
 

My current work is a study of cultural and political internationalism in the United States during and after World War II but before the Cold War--a time when various Americans imagined a number of alternative global futures for the nation.

My book The Idealist tells the unique story of 1940 Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie’s epic journey around it world. It touches down in Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, the Soviet Union, and China, and reveals a planet shrunk by aviation, war, and global demands for freedom.

I show how Willkie's 1943 best-seller, One World, challenged Americans to see the war as a fight against imperialism and racism. It reveals the years between Pearl Harbor and the founding of the United Nations as a time of American ideals tested rather than triumphant, and uncovers Willkie’s neglected efforts to create an interdependent and decolonized world rather than one shaped by competition between the Soviet Union and United States.

Willkie's celebrity at the height of the age of broadcasting meant that these ideals reached a broad popular audience in the United States and abroad. His call for “one world” directly inspired the founders of the United Nations, but his broader vision of global interdependence went unrealized, swept away by the surge of nationalism that accompanied the end of the war.  Willkie’s one world vision inspired decolonization and environmentalism, and now, in our own global times, when “America First” has again become a rallying cry in the U.S., Willkie’s vision of a multilateral and democratic world can still inspire new global idealism today.

I am also developing a long term investigation of the linked discourses of modern selfhood and metropolitan form, concentrating on changing understandings of lived everyday selfhood across the 20th century.

Much of my previous work dealt with the history of 20th century urbanism. I have edited (with Nathan Storring) a selection of the works of the writer and thinker Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book, which includes essays, interviews, and letters, is titled Vital Little Plans: The Uncollected Works of Jane Jacobs, was released by Random House in the fall of 2016.

My first book, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford, 2010), offered a new look at the politics and culture of urban renewal in Manhattan in the twenty years after World War II. I focus on the ways that superblock planning and modernist architecture remade the cityscape of the postwar city and were themselves remade by resistance to their overweening imposition on the lives of ordinary New Yorkers. Urban renewal, I show, was at the heart of New York's simultaneous rise to "world city" status and fall into the "urban crisis."

The book argues that urban renewal in New York is best understood as more than a set of national or municipal policies. I believe that it was also a highly contested vision and cultural symbol, one that was shaped by its interactions with the political culture of the domestic Cold War. In the postwar era the term "urban renewal" came to be understood, by both its proponents and its critics, as a symbol of the way that superblock urban planning and modernist architecture was remaking the daily lives of city-dwellers.

Specifically, I look at four iconic postwar sites: —the United Nations Headquarters complex, Metropolitan Life's middle-income housing development Stuyvesant Town, public housing in East Harlem, and the Lincoln Square renewal area that included Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—, and show how they were physically and culturally constructed as agents and emblems of urban transformation. I explain how they were pitched as cures for urban obsolescence, depicted as symbols of a new city, and received by New Yorkers as reorderings of the fundamental experience of city life.

 

• Graham Foundation for the Advanced Study of the Fine Arts, 2009
• Rockefeller Foundation, Archive Center Research Grant, 2005
• Enders Research Fellowship, 2004

A full list of publications:

 

The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020)

Co-editor (with Nathan Storring), Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs (Random House, 2016)

Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford University Press, 2010)

 

“Dilemmas of World-Wide Thinking: Popular Geographies and the Problem of Empire in Wendell Willkie’s Search for One World,” Modern American History, 3, 2018.

"When Wendell Willkie Went Visiting: Between Interdependency and Exceptionalism in the Public Feeling for One World," American Literary History 26:3 (Fall 2014).

 

“One World: The Lost Internationalism of Wendell Willkie,” The Nation, April 1, 2019.

"Primal Forces" (on Jane Jacobs), n+1 Magazine, December 22, 2016.

“Reading Jane Jacobs Anew,” (with Nathan Storring), The Atlantic City Lab, October 10, 2016.

“Remembering and Understanding Jane Jacobs, Beyond Left and Right,” (with Nathan Storring), The Toronto Globe and Mail, September 30, 2016.

“Williamsburg Houses,” (with Nicholas Dagen Bloom), in Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds., Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies that Transformed A City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) 94-99.

“Stuyvesant Town,” (with Nicholas Dagen Bloom), in Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner, eds., Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies that Transformed A City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) 151-155.

“The Cultural Structure of Postwar Urbanism,” Review Essay, American Quarterly 66:2 (June 2014) 477-488.

“Rip it Up and Start Again? Response to Forum on ‘The Roots and Routes of Urban Renewal,’” Journal of Urban History 40:4 (June 2014) 644-647.

"The Roots and Routes of Urban Renewal," Journal of Urban History 39:3 (May 2013) 366-391.

"Introduction: Thinking Through Urban Renewal," (with Michael Carriere), Journal of Urban History 39:3 (May 2013) 359-365.

"Superblock Stories; Or Ten Episodes in the History of Public Housing," Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 17:1 (March 2013) 38-73.

"Raising The Wild Flag: E.B. White, World Government, and Local Cosmopolitanism in the Postwar Moment," The Journal of Transnational American Studies 4:1 (March 2012) 1-33.

"Living for the City: On Jane Jacobs," Review: Michael Sorkin, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan and Anthony Flint, Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City. The Nation, March 18, 2010.

"Making Place: The Cultural History of the Built Environment," The Proceedings of Spaces of History/Histories of Space: Emerging Approaches to the Study of the Built Environment, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, eScholarship, University of California, September 15, 2010.

"Burning Down The House," Review: Jonathan Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City and Joe Flood: The Fires: How A Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City—and Determined the Future of Cities. The Nation, December 13, 2010.

"The Battle of Lincoln Square: Neighborhood Culture and the Rise of Resistance to Urban Renewal," Planning Perspectives 24:4 (October 2009) 409-433.

"A Social Movement From Above," Review: Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City,1974 to the Present. Reviews in American History, 36: 2, (June 2008) 286-293.

"Suburbia and American Exceptionalism," Review: Robert Beauregard, When America Became Suburban. Reviews in American History, 36: 4 (December 2008) 594-601.

"Jane Jacobs, Reconsidered." Review: Alice Sparberg Alexiou, Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary. In These Times, August 2006, 41-43.

"A Landmark's Middle-Class Myth," New York Times Op-Ed, September 3, 2006.

"The Price Isn't Right." Review: Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. In These Times, April 22, 2003.

"Casualties of Consensus." Review: Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin, eds., After The World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City. In These Times, September 16, 2002. 22-25.

"Centrifugal Cities." Review: Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. The Washington Post. December 26, 2001. C7.

"The Battle of San Francisco." Review: Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism. In These Times, April 2, 2001. 22-25.

"Botched Burbs." Review: Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How The Suburbs Happened and Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. In These Times, July 10, 2000. 19-21.

Review: Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America and Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. American Studies International 37:2 (June 1999). 109-113.

• Co-Director, Fellows Seminar, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, 2012-2013
• Nathalie Rutherford Pierrepont Prize for Leadership, Career Advising, and Motivation, Brown University, 2012
• Spiro Kostof Award, Society of Architectural Historians, 2012 (Honorable Mention)
• Ellis Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians, 2011 (Honorable Mention)
• Graham Foundation for the Arts, Publication and Presentation Grant, 2009-2010
• Franke Interdisciplinary Fellowship, Yale Univ., Sept. 2000- May 2004
• University Fellowship, Yale Univ., Sept. 1999- May 2004
• Presidential Fellowship, George Washington Univ., 1997- 1999

 

• Organization of American Historians
• Urban History Association
• Society for U.S. Intellectual History

 

I teach courses in United States cultural, political, and intellectual life, urban and suburban history, the history and meaning of the built environment, and urban thought and theory.