Degree:
Ph.D., Rice

Specialization:
American History

Research Interests:

• Urban History
• Environmental History
• History of Technology
• Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Research Projects:

My research focuses on the city, technology, and the environment. I have recently finished a book-length study, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). I am now working on a new book on urban and regional planning in the twentieth century from an environmental perspective.

Selected Publications:

Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Cities and Catastrophes: Coping with Emergency in European History, eds. G. Massard-Guilbuad, H. Platt, and D. Schott (Germany: Peter Lang Verlag, 2002.

The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)

City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston, Texas, 1830-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983) 

Selective Recent Activities: 

 “Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City, 1850-2000,” Journal of Urban History (September 2010)

 “Revisiting the Second Ghetto [A Review Essay],” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (Summer 2010)

“Watching Chinatown Backwards: Los Angeles, Mono Lake, and the Restoration of Nature,” a paper presented at the biannual meeting of the International Water History Association (Delft, June 2010)

Invited Speaker, “São Paulo: City of Walls, City of Insurgent Citizenship,” a paper presented to the “Intrinsic Logic” Seminar, TU Darmstadt (Darmstadt, June 2010)

“’According to Hoyt:’ Race, Redlining, and the Life-Cycle of Nieghorhoods,” a paper present at the biannual meeting of the Urban History Association (Las Vegas, October, 2010)

Invited Speaker, “Daniel Burnham and the Trans-Atlantic Origins of Modern Urban Planning,” a  paper present at the Conference on “The Culture of Grand Plans in 1910,” TU Berlin (Berlin, November    2010)

“The Urban Nature of the World’s Fairs: Environmental Perspectives on Paris and Chicago, 1878-1900,”       Cahiers parisiens/Parisian Notebooks, (forthcoming, Special Issue on “Paris-Chicago: Urban Cultures in Perspective,” December 2009)

“Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City, 1850-2000,” Journal of Urban History (forthcoming, 2010-11)

“Constructing Mexico City: Formal and Informal Planning of the Urban Environment since 1945,” a paper presented at the meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, May 2008)

Invited Speaker, “Burnham’s Transatlantic Crossings and the Birth of Modern Planning,” a paper presented at the conference, Burnham, Chicago, and Beyond: Politics, Planning, and the Progressive Era City (Chicago Architecture Foundation and DePaul University, Chicago, June 2009)

”Watering the Mega-Cities: Energy and Environment in Los Angeles, Mexico City and São Paulo,” (First World Congress of Environmental History, Copenhagen, August 2009)

 
Curriculum Vitae

Faculty Office Hours