SACRPH Executive Officers
Francesca Russello Ammon, President, is associate professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. A social and cultural historian of the post-WWII built environment, she is the author of Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (Yale UP, 2016), winner of SACRPH’s Lewis Mumford Prize for the best book in American planning history. She is currently writing a history of postwar preservation and urban renewal based upon the Philadelphia neighborhood of Society Hill. Her research also leverages the digital humanities to integrate photographs, oral histories, and other historical records into narratives of urban change. Her DH projects include Preserving Society Hill , an historical documentation of the urban renewal and historic preservation of a landmark Philadelphia neighborhood; and Sunset Over Sunset, an NEH-funded exploration of Ed Ruscha’s photographic documentation of Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard, which she co-developed in collaboration with Brian Goldstein and Garrett Dash Nelson.
Guadalupe García, Past President, is associate professor of urban studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego. She specializes in the history of cities and colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book, Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana (University of California Press, 2016) examines the intersections of colonialism, empire, and urban space and focuses on free, black, and enslaved peoples in Havana and illustrates urban-based patterns of imperial rule. García’s fellowships and awards include a Distinguished Fellowship at the CUNY Grad Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative and research and digital fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library. She has also held a Transatlantic Research Fellowship at the University of Warwick. Professor García is currently at work on a second book project that explores the use of digital humanities to interrogate how space, scale, and mapping can be used to counter the logic of the archive and expand our contemporary understanding of urban areas. She earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Matthew G. Lasner, President-Elect, is a historian of the built environment whose work focuses on housing and community planning in the 20th century. His book High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century (2012), a history of co-ops, condominiums, and townhouse complexes in the U.S., won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. He is also co-editor of Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City (2016). From 2007-23 he was assistant professor of history at Georgia State University, then associate professor with tenure of urban studies and planning at Hunter College, CUNY. In 2020, he moved to California, where he has taught at University of California, Berkeley and California College of the Arts. He is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Urban History and Buildings & Landscapes, area editor of Oxford Bibliographies in Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and a founding editor of Platform. His next books are a social and cultural history of the post-WWII apartment complex and a co-edited volume on housing activist Catherine Bauer.
Michael Glass, Treasurer, is a political and urban historian of the twentieth-century United States, with research and teaching interests in racism, capitalism, and inequality. His first book, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (forthcoming in fall 2025 with the University of Pennsylvania Press), is a comparative history of race and class inequality in suburban Long Island. The book investigates how the debt instruments of home mortgages and municipal bonds created resource disparities between neighboring places, as well as triggered political struggles for affordable housing, tax equity, and school funding equalization. He is also co-author of an ongoing digital history project, “Building Inequality: Redlining and FHA Rental Housing,” which maps the location of thousands of government-insured apartment projects and examines their relationship to residential segregation. The project will be made public in 2025. His research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Scholars Fellowship, and the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a public high school teacher in New York City.
Aaron Shkuda, Executive Secretary, has run the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities since 2014. Aaron received his PhD in History from the University of Chicago and is the author of The Lofts of Soho: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (University of Chicago Press, April 2016). His next monograph, Building the Financial Capital of the World: Trading Securities and Commodities in New York, Chicago, and New Jersey, 1960-2001, is also under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Aaron has published articles on subjects ranging from arts-focused retail districts to the architecture and planning behind Battery Park City. He was previously an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and launched Stanford University’s ITALIC (Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture) program, a residentially-based arts and humanities immersion program for undergraduates.
Andrew Whittemore, Ex Officio as JPH Editor, is an Associate Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Whittemore’s research focuses on the history of land use regulation, primarily in the United States, with additional interests in planning theory and the history of urban form. He especially focuses on the politics of zoning. He has published on the role of racial bias in historical zoning decisions, the history of American urban form, regulatory precedents for zoning in the United States, and the history of zoning in the Unites States, Canada, and Australia.
SACRPH Board of Directors
Eliana Abu-Hamdi (2021-28) is currently the Program Manager for the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) at MIT. She recently joined the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians as well as the faculty of Pratt Institute as Visiting Associate Professor. She also teaches courses on Global Poverty and the Ethics of Development as well as the History of Global Urbanism at Hunter College, in the Department of Political Science. She is also an experienced architectural practitioner and educator.
She is an urbanist, designer and Middle Eastern/Global South scholar with published articles in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Traditional Dwellings and Settlement Review, as well as Cities. She also has contributed chapters urban governance in the Middle East from from McGill-Queens Press, and another on Social Housing in the Middle East from University of Indiana Press.
Fallon Samuels Aidoo (2024-30), Tulane University, is a preservation planner interested in the history and future of cultural heritage endangered by development, disrepair, and disasters. Real estate that is vital to Black, indigenous, and immigrant culture are the focus of her peer-reviewed publications (e.g. Preservation & Social Inclusion, Routledge Handbook on Cultural Heritage and Disaster Risk Management, Future Anterior 18:1: Retrofit, Change over Time) and public scholarship, e.g. historical markers, surveys, and context statements (e.g. African American Heritage Trail markers, Hermann-Grima and Gallier Houses). Her academic, professional, and public service (e.g. appointments to Louisiana’s National Register of Historic Places Review Committee, the U.S. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation) inform her consulting via StudioRxP to preservation and public history organizations, and vice-versa. At Tulane University School of Architecture, Dr. Aidoo is an Assistant Professor of Real Estate and Historic Preservation and a Faculty Fellow at centers for community engagement, climate change, and AI. She previously held faculty positions at the University of New Orleans, Northeastern University, Harvard, and MIT. Dr. Aidoo holds a PhD in urban planning (Harvard), M.S. in architectural history (MIT) and B.S. in civil/structural engineering (Columbia University).
Michael Allen (2024-30) is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at West Virginia University, where he leads pedagogy around the built environment for the department’s growing public history track. His current research investigates and reclaims modernist architecture’s socially liberatory functions, with a major focus on mass housing programs in the US and socialist Europe. He has a long career as a practitioner and critic of historic preservation, especially in US urban contexts. From 2022-2024, he served as Executive Director of the National Building Arts Center, a museum of the American built environment near St. Louis. From 2016 through 2024, Allen was Senior Lecturer in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and from 2014 through 2024, Lecturer in American Culture Studies (AMCS), at Washington University in St. Louis. Allen co-founded the international interdisciplinary project Housing Blocs: Ordinary Modernism Across the Atlantic with Vladana Putnik Prica. Allen holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Heritage from the University of Birmingham, UK.
Julian C. Chambliss (2021-28) is Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. He is a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His book includes Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience (2013), Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domain (2018), Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018) and Reframing Digital Humanities: Conversations with Digital Humanists (2021). He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in United States History from the University of Florida and B.S. in History from Jacksonville University.
Karilyn Crockett (2024-2030), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focuses on large-scale land use changes in twentieth century American cities and examines the social and geographic implications of structural poverty, racial formations and memory. Karilyn’s book, People before Highways: Boston Activists, Urban Planners, and a New Movement for City Making (UMASS Press, 2018), investigates a 1960s era grassroots movement to halt urban extension of the U.S. interstate highway system and the geographic and political changes in Boston that resulted. In 2019 this book was named one of the “ten best books of the decade” by the Boston Public Library Association of Librarians. Karilyn holds a PhD from the American Studies program at Yale University, a Master of Science in Geography from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale Divinity School. She has previously served in Boston city government; first, as Director of Economic Policy & Research in the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development and later as the City of Boston’s first Chief of Equity. She is a professor of urban history, public policy and planning at MIT and currently leads the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Boston Federal Reserve Bank to assess the regional racial wealth gap.
Alex Sayf Cummings (2019-2026) is a historian at Georgia State University whose work examines how the transition to a postindustrial economy reshaped American culture, public policy, and the built environment. Cummings’s first book, Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2013). Her next project, Brain Magnet: RTP and the Idea of the Idea Economy, looks at North Carolina’s Research Triangle region as a landscape intentionally designed and planned for the high-tech economy. She also co-edited the public history and oral history anthology East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, 1700-2017 (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming, 2020). Dr. Cummings has received a Torbet Prize, a Whiting Fellowship, an ACLS fellowship, and a Dean’s Early Career Award and Provost’s Faculty Fellowship at Georgia State University. She is also a senior editor of the history blog Tropics of Meta. She earned a BA at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and an MA (2005) and PhD (2009) in History from Columbia University.
Stephanie Frank (2019-26) is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning + Design at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she directs the Graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation program. An award-winning mentor, she teaches courses in planning history, historic preservation, housing, land use planning, and urban studies. Her research examines the complexities of corporate power, industrial planning, and urban development in metropolitan America through the film industry. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of
Planning History, the Journal of Urban Design, and Buildings & Landscapes. She is an assistant editor for the Urban History Association’s blog, The Metropole. She earned her Ph.D. in Policy, Planning and Development from the University of Southern California and a B.A. and M.A. in American Studies with a Certificate in Historic Preservation from the University of Maryland.
Evan Friss (2019-26) is a Professor of history at James Madison University and the author of three books: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Random House, 2024), On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). He was also the guest curator of “Cycling in the City,” an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.
Jerry González (2021-28) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Director of the UTSA Mexico Center, Principal Investigator on the UTSA Mellon Humanities Pathways Grant, and a Faculty Fellow in the People’s Academy sponsored by the Democratizing Racial Justice Project in the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UTSA. Prior to arriving to UTSA he spent 2009-2010 as a Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Latina/Latino Studies Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he began work on his book, In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills: Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles published in 2018 by Rutgers University Press in the Series “Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States.” His current research on the emergence of San Antonio as a leading center for Sin Fronteras organizing and activism in the 1970s contributes to current conversations about Latinx migrants remaking U.S. cities and metropolitan regions.
Benjamin Holtzman (2024-30) is Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College/CUNY. He is the author of The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism (Oxford UP, 2021). His research examines cities, race and inequality, social movements, capitalism, and American politics. Holtzman has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Mellon Foundation/Council on Library and Information Resources, and the Miller Center/Jefferson Scholars Foundation. He is currently working on his second book, “Smash the Klan”: Fighting the White Power Movement in the Late Twentieth Century.
Genevieve Kane (2024-30), Grad Student Representative, is a PhD Candidate in the American & New England Studies Program at Boston University. Her dissertation focuses on the environmental and architectural history of Boston’s waterfront since the nineteenth century. She surveys how individual property owners rebuilt the waterfront for industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century when maritime commerce and freight shipping declined. Genna also studies how public officials and private developers redeveloped the waterfront for leisure attractions, luxury residences, and buildings for an information-based economy after World War II. She additionally studies the waterfront’s recent configurations as a climate resilient space. Her work has been supported by the University of California Berkeley’s Environmental Design Archives and the Boston Public Library Leventhal Map & Education Center, among others. Genna strives to connect her scholarship to broad audiences, especially through her written contextual essays for Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America and an essay about Boston’s transportation infrastructure in the Urban History Association’s online blog, The Metropole. Genna draws upon a background of public history and nonprofit management in the Boston area, which supports her interest in and research about Boston’s history. Genna also holds a Master of Science in Nonprofit Management from Northeastern University.
Kevan Q. Malone (2024-30) is a fellow in the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University and the book review editor for the Journal of Planning History. He holds a PhD in history from UC San Diego and an MA in American studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. He studies the urban and environmental history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, with a focus on binational planning and water management in the San Diego-Tijuana area. Research for his book project has been funded by the American Historical Association (AHA), the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the Huntington Library, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the UCLA Special Collections Library, and the Kenneth and Dorothy Hill Foundation for the UC San Diego Special Collections and Archives. Kevan’s writings have appeared in the Washington Post and the San Diego Union-Tribune as well as on The Metropole—the blog of the Urban History Association.
Rosemary Ndubuizu (2019-26) is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University. Dr. Ndubuizu is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies how housing policies are shaped by race, gender, political economy, and ideology. Her untitled manuscript-in-progress historically and ethnographically traces how low-income black women have been affected by post-1970s changes in public and affordable housing policies and advocacy. Her research project also examines the contemporary landscape of affordable housing policy and politics to better understand why low-income black women remain vulnerable to eviction, displacement, and housing insecurity in cities like the District of Columbia. Additionally, her work presents the organizing challenges low-income black women tenant activists in D.C. face as they organize to combat the city’s reduction and privatization of affordable housing. Dr. Ndubuizu earned her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and her PhD from Rutgers University.
Pedro Regalado (2024-30) is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. He is an historian of twentieth-century America, interested in immigration, cities, and capitalism. His current book project, Nueva York: Making the Modern City, weaves together social, economic, and urban history to tell the story of New York City’s Latinx community during the twentieth century, from the “pioneers” who arrived after World War I to the panoply of Latinx people who rebuilt the city in the wake of the 1975 fiscal crisis. Regalado’s work has been featured in the Journal of Urban History, Boston Review, The Washington Post, Platform, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Public Books. In fall 2024, he completes his term on the Board of Directors for the Urban History Association.
Meredith Drake Reitan (2019-26) is an Associate Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Southern California and an adjunct professor in USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy and the School of Architecture where she teaches classes on planning theory, history and cultural heritage. Her primary research interests include the planning profession, cultural landscapes and public space. She has published in the Journal of Planning History, the Journal of Urban Design, the Journal of Architectural and Planning Research and the Journal of the American Planning Association. She is currently at work on a history of the Los Angeles Civic Center. Drake Reitan has a PhD and a Masters in Planning from USC.
Susanna Schaller (2021-28) is Associate Professor in Urban Studies, Administration and Planning at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York. Her most recent work focuses on business improvement districts (BIDs) in Washington, DC. Her book Business Improvement Districts and the Contradictions of Placemaking: BID Urbanism in Washington, D.C. was recently published by the University of Georgia Press. As a certified urban planner, her professional practice has focused on urban governance and economic development as well as small business development and microfinance. She has served as Senior Planner to the Municipal Art Society in New York and has worked with community groups to evaluate rezoning plans for New York City neighborhoods. She has also worked with community-based organizations, including community development finance institutions and community development corporations, to develop microenterprise and small business lending and training programs and to conduct community visioning and strategic planning workshops. She earned her PhD in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University.
Morris “Mo” Speller (2021-28) is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation, Reckoning with Redlines examines the history of mortgage discrimination, predatory lending, racial segregation, and housing policy in St. Louis City from the 1930s-1970s. This longer history of redlining reveals practices through which lenders and city planners adopted the anti-redlining language of “community reinvestment” to promote activities that hardened lines of segregation in St. Louis. His other research interests include the history of queer communities and “gayborhood” politics in Baltimore and the history of Baltimore neighborhoods displaced by urban renewal. He has a Master of Science degree in Human Geography from University of Bristol and received his PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University in Fall 2020.
Domenic Vitiello (2021-28), a historian and planner, is Associate Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research, teaching, and practice focus on immigrant communities, urban agriculture and food system planning, and community economic development. His books and articles include The Sanctuary City (Cornell UP, 2022 – open access); Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States (Penn Press, 2017), co-edited with Tom Sugrue; Engineering Philadelphia (Cornell UP, 2014); “The Planned Destruction of Chinatowns in the United States and Canada since c.1900,” in Planning Perspectives (2020), with Zoe Blickenderfer; and “The Hidden History of Food System Planning,” in the Journal of Planning History (2014), with Catherine Brinkley. Domenic is Editor for the Americas for the journal Urban History, a member of the IPHS Council,and previously served on SACRPH’s board in the early 2000s.