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Alison E. Isenberg Associate Professor of History Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania B.A., Yale University At Rutgers Since 2001 732-932-5442
311A Van Dyck Hall
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RESEARCH INTERESTS My research and teaching interests lie in nineteenth and twentieth century America, focusing on the intersections of culture, economy, and place. Specific research topics and themes include the twentieth century, cities and suburbs, business culture, preservation, public history, urban planning, design, material culture, and the built environment. I am president-elect of the Society for City and Regional Planning History. My research, teaching, and major professional activities are described below. COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT Undergraduate - 512:104 Development of the United States from 1865
- 512:314 Cities and Suburbs in American History
- 506:401 The Entrepreneurial Ideal in American History
- The History of Historic Preservation: How Americans Remember, Rebuild, and Demolish the Past
- Metropolitan History and Preservation: New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic
- Designing the University: Past, Present, and Future (with Professor Carla Yanni, Art History Department)
- Honors course: The Spaces Between: Architecture, Urban History, and the City (with Professor Carla Yanni, Art History Department)
- America since 1945
- Race, Immigration, and the City
- American Landscapes: Society and Architecture in the South
Graduate - 510:571 Research Seminar: Recent American History
- American PDR III: The Twentieth Century
- Colloquium: Urban History
- Colloquium: Urbanism Unclothed: Gender and the Built Environment
PUBLICATIONS AND AWARDS - Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (University of Chicago Press, August 2004, paperback June 2005)
- 2005 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians
- 2005 Honor Book, New Jersey Council for the Humanities
- Selected as a 2005 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
- 2005 Historic Preservation Book Prize, awarded by the Center for Historic Preservation, University of Mary Washington
- 2005 Lewis Mumford Prize, Society for American City and Regional Planning History
- “Transcending Ghetto Boundaries,” in second edition of Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (University of Illinois Press, 2007).
CURRENT RESEARCH & WRITING
I am now writing two new books, co-editing a volume, and completing a chapter for a forthcoming edited collection. BooksSecond-hand Cities The antique and second-hand trades serve as a lens for understanding the politics and economy of preserving American heritage, furniture, buildings and neighborhoods. In this project I explore the relationship of these preservation industries to the racial reconfiguring of cities and their regions, and to the broader politics of race, gender, and place. Various social and demographic upheavals—the Civil War; intensive immigration and urbanization of the late 19th century; the Great Migration; the depression; urban renewal; suburbanization and “white flight”—have resulted in the massive recirculation and redistribution of used goods at every scale, from old furniture to old neighborhoods. Uncovering such stories identifies recycling as the core dynamic of regional change, and sheds new light on the race and gender dimensions of urban inheritance.
Urbanism Unclothed This book examines the field of urban design from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period critical to the remaking of American cities. During these dramatic and devastating years of urban renewal, the question in planning and design shifted from “what shall we tear down,” to “what shall we keep.” Each chapter is a case study which allows me to explore what urban design looked like in practice, not theory. My approach (rooted in the methodologies of urban and cultural history) accounts for many of the participants who shaped public space in addition to the well-known architects and planners. I include, for example, graphic designers, public relations consultants, sculptors, model-makers, retail managers, tenant leasing, maintenance work, foundation support, critics, and consumers. Essay “What to Keep? Planning, Design, and the City’s Future” I am contributing this essay to a forthcoming volume Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America (Rutgers University Press, 2008). The book is an interdisciplinary collaboration among Rutgers faculty brought together by the Center for Race and Ethnicity. My essay examines rebuilding efforts and frustrations in the Gulf, in order to understand what urban planning and design offer today to the improvement of urban life. The experiences of the last two years, when put in historical perspective, reveal and amplify stark questions about the purpose and function of cities, and their constant redevelopment. Co-edited volume Together with Robin Bachin, Charlton W. Tebeau Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami, I am working on a co-edited volume Home Away from Home: The Transformations of Seaside Recreation on the East Coast, 1865-2000. Honors & Fellowships - 2008 Baker-Nord Visiting Scholar, Humanities Week 2008, Baker Nord Center for the Humanities, Case Western Reserve University
- 2007 Plenary address/Cornelius O’Brien Speaker, Cornelius O’Brien Historic Preservation and Indiana Main Street Conference
- 2006-7 Visiting Fellow, Research Institute, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University
- 2006-7 Research Fellowship, James Marston Fitch Foundation
- 2006-7 Research Fellowship, Graham Foundation
- 2006 Research grant, Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation
- 2005-6 Gill Fellowship (one month), Winterthur Museum and Library
- 2005-6 Research Grant, Rockefeller Archive Center
- 2003 Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Grant supporting publication of Downtown America
- F2000 Fellow, Institute for the Arts & Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- 1999-2000 Grant-in-Aid, Hagley Museum and Library
- 1998-9 Visiting Scholar, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College
- 1995 John Reps Award for Best Dissertation in Planning History
- 1992 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
Professional Service At the October 2007 biennial conference of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) in Portland, Maine, I became president-elect of that organization. (See 2007 Conference Program). SACRPH brings together academics (from history, design and planning schools, American studies, geography, environmental history, art history, sociology, preservation, policy, etc.) and practitioners. It is a unique, cross-disciplinary forum, injecting history into contemporary planning/design, and shaping the work of historians by bringing them into sustained conversation with diverse practitioners. The 2007 meeting met jointly with the Northern New England Chapter of the American Planning Association (NNECAPA). SACRPH’s next conference will take place in Oakland, California during fall 2009. Please contact me with any questions about the planning of that meeting, since I will co-chair the program committee. I have served on the board of the Urban History Association since 2005, and on the editorial board of H-Urban since 1998. I am the review editor for the Journal of Planning History (published by SAGE), and welcome inquiries about potential topics. In particular I seek out longer, multiple-book review essays offering the opportunity to weigh in on larger trends and concepts relating to the shaping of cities and regions. I am also interested in commissioning more reviews by historians of contemporary plans. Professional Appointments Before joining the Rutgers University History Department in 2001, I taught as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Florida International University. During the summer and fall of 1992, I undertook historical research for the New Jersey Coastal Heritage Trail--part of the National Park Service’s Historic American Buildings Survey. Between 1985 and 1989 I worked first as a planner for the New York City Parks Department, and then as a neighborhood mortgage officer in the South Bronx for the Community Preservation Corporation. In 1983 my introduction to the fields of development and preservation came in the form of a summer position with the New Haven Preservation Trust. |
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