I’m a historian of architecture and urbanism, and currently a postdoctoral follow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
My first book is a global history of the Townscape movement, a widely influential planning movement that emerged in 1940s Britain. It is under contract with Harvard University Press.
The book seeks to explain the revival of the dense, mixed-use urban neighborhood in the late twentieth century, from Britain to brownstone Brooklyn. The manuscript is based on my dissertation, which won the Shephard B. Clough Prize in European history from Columbia, the Anthony Sutcliffe Dissertation Award from the International Planning History Society, and the Michael Katz Dissertation Award from the Urban History Association.
My writing has appeared online in The Atlantic, Dissent, The New Republic, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books.
Journal Articles
“The Townscape Movement and the Politics of Post-War Urbanism,” Twentieth Century British History 32, 3 (September 2021), 392-415
“Legislating the Labor Force: Sedentarization and Development in India and the United States, 1870-1915,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 61, 4 (October 2019), 835-863 **Honorable Mention, Walter D. Love Article Prize, North American Conference on British Studies
Work in Progress
“British History in an Age of Displacement,” in “Forum: The Past, Present, and Futures of Modern British History,” Modern British History (forthcoming)
“Fueling the 1970s City,” in Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler, and Otto Saumarez Smith, eds. The Modern British City (forthcoming)
Essays and Reviews
“Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher by John Davis,” English Historical Review (May 2023)
“Provincializing the Picturesque,” in Citymakers: Pragmatics of the Picturesque (Allies and Morrison, 2022)
“The Pandemic Reminded Us That Most Women Still Don’t Have a Room of Their Own,” The Atlantic, 2022
“Is Mahua Moitra India’s AOC?” The Nation, 2021
“The Lost Plan for a Black Utopian Town,” The New Republic, 2021
“Were We Not Promised to Be Free?” Dissent, 2021
“Ruth Glass: Beyond ‘Gentrification,’” New York Review of Books, 2020
“Afterlives of the Emergency,” Dissent, 2019