Current Leadership

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 through her website Preserving Society Hill and an NEH-funded exploration of Ed Ruscha’s photographic documentation of Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard.

Guadalupe García, Past President, 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.

Brad Hunt, Treasurer, is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Loyola University Chicago.  Since July 2020, he has collaborated with the department’s 29 full-time faculty members to promote scholarship and teaching in history.  The department supports 200 undergraduate majors and minors, manages thriving MA and PhD programs in History and Public History, and teaches courses in Loyola’s Core Curriculum.  From 2015-20, Brad served as Vice President for Research and Academic Programs at The Newberry Library in Chicago, where he oversaw fellowship programs, four research centers, and programs for scholars, teachers, students, and the public.  At the Newberry, he conceived and produced Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots with colleagues Karen Christianson, Elizabeth Cummings, and Liesl Olson.  Chicago 1919 won the 2020 National Council on Public History award for Best Public History Project.  His history of the Chicago Housing Authority, titled Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (University of Chicago Press, 2009), won the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society of American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) for the best book in North American Planning History in 2008-09.  He served as President of SACRPH in 2018-19.  He is the co-author, with Jon B. DeVries, of Planning Chicago (Taylor & Francis, 2013) which examines urban planning initiatives in Chicago since the 1950s  Since 2008, he has served on the board of the National Public Housing Museum.  Prior to the Newberry, he was a vice provost and dean at Roosevelt University in Chicago, where he was also professor of social science and history.  He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and his B.A. from Williams College. 

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.

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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), West Virginia University, 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 an associate professor of history at James Madison University and the author of two books: 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 Malone, (2024-30) is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Texas Tech University. He holds an MA in American studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a PhD in history from the University of California, San Diego. He is currently writing a history of urban planning and environmental management at the U.S.-Mexico border during the twentieth century. During his time as a post-doctoral fellow, he is conducting research in the Texas Tech University library’s Southwest Collection, the National Archives in Fort Worth, the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, and the UTEP Special Collections in El Paso. Kevan’s research has also been funded by the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and fellowships for the Huntington Library, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the UCLA Special Collections Library, and UC San Diego’s Special Collections and Archives. His writings have appeared in the Washington Post and the San Diego Union-Tribune. 

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.

Sanjeev Vidyarthi is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Vidyarthi’s research interests include ideas and actions in the domains of spatial planning and design, planning history and theory, globalization and international planning. He studies who does (and should do) the planning work and some of the differences these efforts make. His projects involves helping actors and communities make better plans that bridge the many divides in society and improve the quality of urban life. His work as appeared in the Journal of Planning History, Town Planning Review, Planning Theory and Practice, and the edited collection Transforming Asian Cities, among other venues.

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.