Displacement and redevelopment may feel like natural elements of urban growth in America, but the landscapes and inequalities of our current urban model were invented, and challenged, throughout the nineteenth century. My research focuses on the overlapping histories of race and capitalism, centering marginalized historical actors to reorient our understanding of city life and urban development in the United States, now and in the nineteenth century.
My work integrates questions and methods of the history of race, urban history, the history of capitalism, environmental history, and historical memory, demonstrating how inequalities shaped diverse Americans’ abilities to navigate complex economic and social upheavals across the nation.
My work integrates questions and methods of the history of race, urban history, the history of capitalism, environmental history, and historical memory, demonstrating how inequalities shaped diverse Americans’ abilities to navigate complex economic and social upheavals across the nation.
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SENECA VILLAGE
My current book manuscript, The Rise and Fall of Seneca Village: Remaking Race and Space in Nineteenth-Century New York City, intervenes in these fields through a study of Seneca Village, the largest African American community in New York City until it was destroyed in order to build Central Park in the late antebellum period. Piecing together forgotten traces of the neighborhood and highlighting the voices of marginalized New Yorkers, I analyze the creation and destruction of a free black community that grappled with racial discrimination and internal class tensions to establish an experimental model of black freedom. My analysis of Seneca Village illuminates the intricate, and often overlooked, daily workings of activism and urban capitalism at a pivotal moment in the creation of modern American cities. |
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BEFORE GENTRIFICATION
My second book project will establish a prehistory of gentrification in the United States, analyzing and connecting the grand urban development agendas that spread from city to city during transitional periods of American capitalism in the nineteenth-century. By centering the experiences of African American communities fighting for their own place in rapidly changing cities, my work will highlight urban capitalism’s core structures and the racial inequalities stemming from their implementation. Scholars of gentrification often understand the process as a uniquely contemporary and seemingly inevitable model of urban change. By tracing its roots to nineteenth century cities, I will show that modern plans for urban growth rely on earlier conceptualizations of the city, historicizing centuries of redevelopment and resistance. |
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EXPERIMENTS IN FREEDOM
Future work will also delve into experimental African American anti-slavery and advancement projects in early America, focusing on those that have been dismissed as failures in order to reconsider how historians define successful political endeavors. I will demonstrate how a dynamic movement coalesced out of many interconnected efforts, emphasizing the necessity of considering diverse ways black activists envisioned and fought for equality in early America. |
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES
My work also engages with contemporary issues of race, urban space, and housing inequality today. I have conducted research for urban policy and housing rights organizations, and am developing a project titled Silicon Cities on the ways tech companies shifted models of urban development in the twenty first century.
My work also engages with contemporary issues of race, urban space, and housing inequality today. I have conducted research for urban policy and housing rights organizations, and am developing a project titled Silicon Cities on the ways tech companies shifted models of urban development in the twenty first century.