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, “From Urban Renewal to Human Renewal: Model Cities and the Design of Citizenship After Civil Rights, 1964-1974” tracks how, amid the competing policies and meager funding of the U.S. War on Poverty's primary urban development program, efforts to construct a post-urban renewal architecture of "human renewal,"--housing, daycares, youth centers, schools, libraries, clinics, & neighborhood centers--defined citizenship's limits at the moment of its expansion in the post-Civil Rights era. As part of this project, i have written on how civil rights leader Whitney M. Young Jr.’s long-overlooked influence on the Model Cities Program helps understand local frustration over how struggles for nationwide reparation turned into a program of hard-fought representation. I have also written on how despite these struggles, Model Cities grants helped local activists build vital public infrastructure, including more fairly integrated schools and neighborhood service centers. As part of a secondary project, "Model Minority Urbanism," I have also written on how the spatial regulation of Korean-owned small businesses in turn regulates the various peoples they serve and on how spaces designed for the restriction of Asian immigration set precedents for today’s immigration detention facilities. PSoA Profile / LinkedIn / Contact More Recent Work 150+ biographical entries for the Black Architects Archive Redlining in Pawtucket & Central Falls Rhode Island for Mapping Inequality "American Architecture as a Settler Colonial Project: Sidney Fiske Kimball’s American Architecture" with Carrie Bly, for Race &, Society of Architectural Historians podcast |