I am a historian of the built environment broadly concerned with race, design, and the state. I'm currently pursuing a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton.
My dissertation, “Human Renewal: Race and the Design of Citizenship at the Fall of Urban Renewal,” highlights the activists, students, designers, and policymakers who convened around the Model Cities Program (1966-1974). Model Cities sought to reform urban renewal by concentrating the resources of the War on Poverty into the simultaneous physical and social redevelopment of hundreds of “model neighborhoods” across the country. I recently examined in Planning Perspectives how civil rights leader Whitney M. Young Jr.’s long-overlooked influence on Model Cities helps understand both the aspirations that Black activists and organizations held for the program and the frustrations these critics experienced when potentials for nationwide reparation turned into a program of hard-fought representation. As part of a broader interest in model minoritization and relational racialization, I also wrote a forthcoming essay on how the spatial regulation of Korean-owned small businesses in turn regulates the various peoples they serve and previously wrote in e-flux architecture on how spaces designed for the restriction of Asian immigration set precedents for today’s immigration detention facilities. At Princeton, I am a Black Architects Archive research fellow and a co-organizer of the Faculty-Graduate Asian American Studies Reading Group and Lecture Series. PSoA Profile / LinkedIn / Contact More Recent Work 150+ biographical entries for the Black Architects Archive "American Architecture as a Settler Colonial Project: Sidney Fiske Kimball’s American Architecture" with Carrie Bly, Race &, Society of Architectural Historians, June 2021 |