Graduate Student Bios

Sarah Coffman is a fifth-year PhD candidate focusing on twentieth century African American and urban history. She received her BA in History and African American studies from Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois in 2021. Her research, centered in late-nineteenth and twentieth century Philadelphia, examines how Black people across property ownership categories—homeowners, renters, housing-insecure, and unhoused—navigated the violent constraints of urban real estate markets on a daily basis. Within these stories, she is thematically interested in the maintenance and persistence of segregation, racial capitalism in real estate, how gender impacts Black shelter seeking, and public health and environmental illness.