Bio/Research
I’m an urban and environmental historian whose research interests lie at the intersections
of public policy, class and race, and the uneven ways in which spatial transformations
(i.e., development) affect socio-economic relations and our built and natural environments.
Though most of my research and writing has focused on the contested politics of urban
renewal and sustainability in and around New York City, I have recently gone further
abroad in my efforts, writing about the kleptocratic tendencies of the government
in South Sudan, which has bribed itself a weak measure of loyalty from fractious militia
units through the destructive exploitation of the country’s natural resources and
peoples. My doctoral work focused on the history of New York City’s community gardens
and the various on-going efforts to preserve them. Complicating traditional narratives
of these sites serving solely as spaces where the grassroots reclaim their right to the city, reimaging the metropolis as an oeuvre, this dissertation used New York’s community gardens as a prism for understanding the
ways in which local appropriations of space are product of, and guided by, both bottom-up
and top-down forces and are enmeshed in the contradictory politics of sustainability,
urban renewal, and the festive rebranding of post-industrial cities. In a similar
vein, I recently published a chapter examining the social, cultural, political, and
economic forces converging in the uneven restoration—and potential environmental gentrification—of
the lower Bronx River in the South Bronx.
