Fields of study: U.S. sub/urban history, history of education, history of medicine, im/migration history, Asian American studies, and comparative/relational ethnic studies.
About
A scholar of twentieth-century U.S. history, urban studies, ethnic studies, and higher education, I am centrally interested in the politics of knowledge, placemaking, and social welfare. My research explores how public officials, university and hospital leaders, and working-class people reshaped U.S. cities as they transitioned to a postindustrial knowledge economy. As a community engaged scholar and a former political journalist, I aim to use historical research to make public interventions around contemporary questions of urban development, educational practice, and social justice.
My dissertation, “Community Development in the Eds and Meds City,” examines contests over redevelopment, institutional governance, and labor relations in Boston between the 1960s and the turn of the twenty-first century. I argue that as administrators, faculty, students, and neighbors debated what it meant for universities and academic medical centers to serve the public good, the relationship between institutions and their host communities became a central site in the struggle for urban democracy. My work on this project has received support from the American Federation of Teachers, the Boston Public Library, the Phillip J. Bowman Center for Scholarship to Practice, and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
