SACRPH Executive Officers
Matthew G. Lasner, President, 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.
Francesca Russello Ammon, Past 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.
Meredith Drake Reitan, President-Elect, 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.
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 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 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.
Brent D. Ryan, Ex Officio as JPH Editor, is Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy at MIT. His research focuses on the aesthetics and policies of contemporary urban design, particularly with respect to current and pressing issues like deindustrialization and climate change. His books include The Largest Art (MIT Press, 2017) and Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities (Penn Press, 2012). He received his M.Arch. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in urban design and planning from MIT.
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 Vice Provost for Research and Strategic Partnerships at Pratt Institute. 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 a Research Fellow at the National Building Arts Center. He was was most recently Visiting Assistant Professor of History at West Virginia University, where he led 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.
John C. Arroyo, AICP (2026-32) is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California San Diego (with additional affiliations in Chicanx and Latinx Studies, Latin American Studies, and The Design Lab). Prior to this appointment he was Assistant Professor in Engaging Diverse Communities (with affiliations in Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Historic Preservation) at the University of Oregon, where he was also Founder and Director of the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice. Previously he was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow in Latino Studies at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is now a board member. He received his PhD in Urban Planning, Policy, and Design from MIT. Dr. Arroyo is a national expert on the social, political, and cultural dimensions of immigrant-centered built and natural environments, culturally informed urban design practices in emerging gateways, public and digital humanities, and arts and cultural planning. He has served on the board of the Public Humanities Network (Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes) and was a governor-appointed member of the State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation (Oregon State Parks). He is from unincorporated East L.A.
Susanne Cowan (2026-32) is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Montana State University’s School of Architecture. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines how participatory design and community organizing impact neighborhood planning. Her dissertation analyzed the publicity and engagement events for postwar planning in East London and the United Kingdom more broadly. Her subsequent publications have assessed how neighborhood organizing and historic preservation in St. Louis have impacted racial and class integration. Currently Cowan is studying the impact of historic preservation on affordable housing in Bozeman, Montana. She has been a regular presenter at the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) since 2009. As part of her professional service, Cowan has organized and chaired conference sessions, mentored new scholars, reviewed conference abstracts, reviewed journal articles and books, and served on the selection committee for the Urban History Association’s Michael Katz Award for best dissertation.
Karilyn Crockett (2024-30), 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.
Peter Ekman (2026-32) is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California as well as Coordinator of Programs for USC’s Dornsife Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. In his postdoctoral years, he has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, Cornell University, the Huntington Library, the American Geographical Society Library, USC, and the Berggruen Institute. His first book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America’s Postwar Urbanism, was published with Cornell University Press in late 2024. A second, shorter book, Social Distance and the City, is under contract with Cambridge University Press for publication in 2027. Other writing has appeared in Planning Perspectives, the Journal of Planning History, the Journal of Urban History, History of the Human Sciences, Qui Parle, PLATFORM, Oxford Bibliographies in Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, the edited volumes Landscapes of Housing (Routledge) and Infrastructural Times (Bristol University Press), and other venues. He has attended SACRPH conferences since 2015.
Jerry González (2021-28) is Professor of History, O’Connor Chair, and Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at St. Mary’s University. Previously at the University of Texas, San Antonio, he was 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.
Ella Howard, PhD (2026-32) is Professor of History at Wentworth Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses in environmental history, urban history, digital humanities, and applied artificial intelligence. Her research examines the history of cities and the built environment and explores the use of computational and AI methods to develop new approaches to historical research and teaching. Howard is the author of Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), which traces the history of New York City’s Bowery and the changing geography of homelessness and poverty. Her current research focuses on the environmental and urban history of the U.S. Superfund program. As part of this work, she is collaborating with a computer scientist to develop a large corpus of approximately 300,000 EPA documents and to investigate the use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), GIS, and other computational methods for analyzing large historical archives. Howard also researches simulation and games-based learning as part of the pedagogical response to the large language models. Across her research and teaching, she seeks interdisciplinary approaches that connect historical inquiry with contemporary environmental, technological, and urban challenges.
Genevieve Kane (2024-30) is a Fellow at the Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library. She completed her PhD in the American & New England Studies Program at Boston University, writing a dissertation focused 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 Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Miami and the book review editor for the Journal of Planning History. He was previously a fellow in the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. 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.
Garrett Dash Nelson (2026-32) is a historical geographer who currently serves as President & Head Curator of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. His scholarship focuses on regionalism, spatial transformation, the landscape history of the United States, and the politics of place. He is also a practitioner of the geospatial digital humanities, both as a developer and educator. At the Leventhal Center, he curates exhibitions, oversees research fellowships and collections, and manages a broad suite of digital projects. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an MA in Landscape and Culture from the University of Nottingham, and an AB in Social Studies and Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College. He is also a faculty affiliate at Northeastern University in the Department of History.
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.
Joshua Rosen (2026-32), Graduate Student Representative, is a PhD candidate in History at Boston College. He studies the twentieth-century United States, with interests in urban history, political economy, and racial inequality. His dissertation will focus on the rental housing market in Greater Boston between the 1960s and the Great Recession, and will trace how decades of successive housing crises produced our current unaffordable private rental market, in which one half of tenants are rent burdened. His research has been supported by the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium and the Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy at Boston College. Rosen’s Metropole article, “My Street Looks Different Now: Oral History and the Anti-Redlining Movement,” was awarded Best Graduate Student Blog Post of 2024 by the Urban History Association. Before starting his PhD, Rosen taught U.S. History for five years at Bronx Compass High School. He also worked as an educator at the Tenement Museum, an immigration and migration history museum on New York’s Lower East Side.
Stephanie Ryberg-Webster (2026-32) is a Professor of Urban Affairs at the Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs in the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education at Cleveland State University. Her research focuses on the intersection of historic preservation and urban development. Ryberg-Webster has studied the use and effects of federal and state historic rehabilitation tax credits on local urban development, the role of preservation in shaping the future of legacy cities, the history of historic preservation, and the integration of preservation in citywide comprehensive planning. In 2023, she published Preserving the Vanishing City: Historic Preservation amid Urban Decline in Cleveland, Ohio, which explores the formation of the preservation sector in Cleveland and preservation initiatives during the 1970s and 1980s. Her current projects focus on exploring the intersection of HOLC redlining practices with contemporary historic preservation, uncovering the history of historic preservation in Cincinnati, Ohio, and exploring the intersection of preservation and community development across the State of Ohio. At the Maxine Goodman Levin School, Ryberg-Webster teaches courses on urban planning, historic preservation, the architectural history of Cleveland, and qualitative research methods. She earned her Bachelor of Urban Planning from the University of Cincinnati, a Master of Historic Preservation from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
Domenic Vitiello (2021-28), a historian and planner, is 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.
Zeead Yaghi (2026-32) is a scholar, writer, and editor. He received his PhD in History from the University of California San Diego in June 2024 and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Development Studies at the American University of Beirut. He is broadly interested in the history of the modern Middle East; global histories of planning; and the development, political economy, and culture of urban and rural spaces across the Mediterranean. He has written essays and articles for several Arabic and English publications and is currently developing a book manuscript based on his doctoral research, which focused on state modernization, planning, and development in rural Lebanon during the 1960s.