SACRPH Executive Officers

Guadalupe García, President, specializes in the history of cities and colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her first book, Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana (University of California Press, 2016) examines the intersections of colonialism, empire, and urban space and focuses on free, black, and enslaved peoples in Havana and illustrates urban-based patterns of imperial rule.  García’s fellowships and awards include a Distinguished Fellowship at the CUNY Grad Center’s Advanced Research Collaborative and research and digital fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library. She has also held a Transatlantic Research Fellowship at the University of Warwick. Professor García is currently at work on a second book project that explores the use of digital humanities to interrogate how space, scale, and mapping can be used to counter the logic of the archive and expand our contemporary understanding of urban areas.  She earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Francesca Russello Ammon, President-Elect, is associate professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. A social and cultural historian of the post-WWII built environment, she is the author of Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (Yale UP, 2016), winner of SACRPH’s Lewis Mumford Prize for the best book in American planning history. She is currently writing a history of postwar preservation and urban renewal based upon the Philadelphia neighborhood of Society Hill. Her research also leverages the digital humanities to integrate photographs, oral histories, and other historical records into narratives of urban change through her website Preserving Society Hill and an NEH-funded exploration of Ed Ruscha’s photographic documentation of Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard.

Marta Gutman, Past President, is an architect and architectural and urban historian. She is Dean at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York and a professor in that school and in the PhD Programs in Art History and Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her publications include A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950 (Chicago, 2014), named a THE book of the year (2014), and awarded several prizes including the Kenneth Jackson prize from the Urban History Association (2015) and the Spiro Kostof prize from the Society of Architectural Historians (2017). She co-edited Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children (Rutgers 2008) and Buildings & Landscapes: The Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (2009-2015). Gutman’s research has been supported by the CUNY Advanced Research Collaborative, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Danish Humanities Research Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her current book project is Just Space: Architecture, Education, and Inequality in Postwar Urban America (Texas, forthcoming). Gutman is a founding editor of PLATFORM.

D. Bradford Hunt, Treasurer, is Professor and Chair in the Department of History at Loyola University Chicago. From 2015-20, he was Vice President for Research and Academic Programs at the Newberry Library. Previously, he had taught and administered at Roosevelt University in Chicago. His history of the Chicago Housing Authority, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (University of Chicago Press, 2009), won the Lewis Mumford Prize from SACRPH. He is the co-author with Jon B. DeVries of Planning Chicago (American Planners Press, 2013) which examines urban planning initiatives in that city since the 1950s. He is on the board of the National Public Housing Museum (www.nphm.org). He received a PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.

Bruce Stephenson, Executive Secretary, is a consultant and professor of Environmental Studies at Rollins College.  His 2015 biography, John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner, won the JB Jackson book award.  His latest book, Portland’s Good Life: Sustainability and Hope in an American City, documents how sustainability has evolved since Lewis Mumford penned a regional plan for Portland.  The intersection of planning and sustainability is also explored in contributions to Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change (U. of Penn, 2019) and The Wilder Heart of Florida (U Fl Press, 2021).  He directs the ecological restoration of the Genius Preserve, which earned a 1000 Friends of Florida Community Betterment Award.  

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SACRPH Board of Directors

Eliana Abu-Hamdi, is currently the Program Manager for the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) at MIT. She recently joined the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians as well as the faculty of Pratt Institute as Visiting Associate Professor. She also teaches courses on Global Poverty and the Ethics of Development as well as the History of Global Urbanism at Hunter College, in the Department of Political Science. She is also an experienced architectural practitioner and educator.

She is an urbanist, designer and Middle Eastern/Global South scholar with published articles in the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Traditional Dwellings and Settlement Review, as well as Cities. She also has contributed chapters urban governance in the Middle East from from McGill-Queens Press, and another on Social Housing in the Middle East from University of Indiana Press.

Julian C. Chambliss, is Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. He is a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces. His book includes Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience (2013), Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural and Geopolitical Domain (2018), Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018) and Reframing Digital Humanities: Conversations with Digital Humanists (2021). He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in United States History from the University of Florida and B.S. in History from Jacksonville University. 

Alex Sayf Cummings is a historian at Georgia State University whose work examines how the transition to a postindustrial economy reshaped American culture, public policy, and the built environment.  Cummings’s first book, Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2013).  Her next project, Brain Magnet: RTP and the Idea of the Idea Economy, looks at North Carolina’s Research Triangle region as a landscape intentionally designed and planned for the high-tech economy. She also co-edited the public history and oral history anthology East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, 1700-2017 (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming, 2020). Dr. Cummings has received a Torbet Prize, a Whiting Fellowship, an ACLS fellowship, and a Dean’s Early Career Award and Provost’s Faculty Fellowship at Georgia State University. She is also a senior editor of the history blog Tropics of Meta. She earned a BA at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and an MA (2005) and PhD (2009) in History from Columbia University.

Stephanie Frank is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning + Design at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she directs the Graduate Certificate in Historic Preservation program. An award-winning mentor, she teaches courses in planning history, historic preservation, housing, land use planning, and urban studies. Her research examines the complexities of corporate power, industrial planning, and urban development in metropolitan America through the film industry. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Planning History, the Journal of Urban Design, and Buildings & Landscapes. She is an assistant editor for the Urban History Association’s blog, The Metropole. She earned her Ph.D. in Policy, Planning and Development from the University of Southern California and a B.A. and M.A. in American Studies with a Certificate in Historic Preservation from the University of Maryland.

Evan Friss is an associate professor of history at James Madison University and the author of two books: On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2019) and The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s (University of Chicago Press, 2015). He was also the guest curator of “Cycling in the City,” an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.

Paige Glotzer, Communications Director, is Assistant Professor & John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include the history of housing segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Her first book, entitled How the Suburbs Were Segregated: Developers and the Business of Exclusionary Housing, 1890-1960, was published by Columbia University Press in 2020. It charts how suburban developers, including Baltimore’s Roland Park Company, ushered in modern housing segregation with the help of transnational financiers, real estate institutions, and public policymakers. She recently completed a digital project that maps the British investors who financed one of the first segregated suburbs in the United States. Future projects include a turn toward global urban history, focusing on the interactions between American realtors and Latin American consumers in the mid-twentieth century. She earned a Ph.D. in History at Johns Hopkins University.

Jerry González is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Director of the UTSA Mexico Center, Principal Investigator on the UTSA Mellon Humanities Pathways Grant, and a Faculty Fellow in the People’s Academy sponsored by the Democratizing Racial Justice Project in the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UTSA. Prior to arriving to UTSA he spent 2009-2010 as a Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Latina/Latino Studies Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he began work on his book, In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills: Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles published in 2018 by Rutgers University Press in the Series “Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the United States.” His current research on the emergence of San Antonio as a leading center for Sin Fronteras organizing and activism in the 1970s contributes to current conversations about Latinx migrants remaking U.S. cities and metropolitan regions.

Willow Lung-Amam is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia (University of California Press) and has written numerous articles on the topic of Asian immigrant suburbanization. Other recent projects have focused on equitable development, gentrification, the suburbanization of poverty, and the geography of opportunity. Her research has appeared also various journals and books such as Journal of Urban Design and Journal of Planning, Education and Research, and popular media outlets, including The Washington Post , The Baltimore Sun, and The Atlantic’s CityLab.

Rosemary Ndubuizu is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University. Dr. Ndubuizu is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies how housing policies are shaped by race, gender, political economy, and ideology. Her untitled manuscript-in-progress historically and ethnographically traces how low-income black women have been affected by post-1970s changes in public and affordable housing policies and advocacy. Her research project also examines the contemporary landscape of affordable housing policy and politics to better understand why low-income black women remain vulnerable to eviction, displacement, and housing insecurity in cities like the District of Columbia. Additionally, her work presents the organizing challenges low-income black women tenant activists in D.C. face as they organize to combat the city’s reduction and privatization of affordable housing.  Dr. Ndubuizu earned her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and her PhD from Rutgers University.

Angel Nieves is Professor of History & Digital Humanities in the Department of History in the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) at San Diego State University whose scholarship focuses on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and technology in the U.S. and South Africa. He is the author and co-editor of two historical monographs, including “An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South” (U Rochester, 2018) and “’We Shall Independent Be:’ African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the U.S.” (w/Alexander) (UPColorado, 2008), plus a range of cutting-edge digital history publications and experimental online platforms. Among these are “Soweto’76 3D,” comprising digital archive and virtual reality research into politically fraught sites such as the Nelson Mandela House in Soweto, Johannesburg. Nieves has received support for his work from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and while Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Initiative (2009-2017) at Hamilton College he helped raise over $2.7 million dollars in research support for digital scholarship. He was Presidential Visiting Associate Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the DHLab at Yale University (2017-2018).

Meredith Drake Reitan is an Associate Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Southern California and an adjunct professor in USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy and the School of Architecture where she teaches classes on planning theory, history and cultural heritage. Her primary research interests include the planning profession, cultural landscapes and public space. She has published in the Journal of Planning History, the Journal of Urban Design, the Journal of Architectural and Planning Research and the Journal of the American Planning Association. She is currently at work on a history of the Los Angeles Civic Center. Drake Reitan has a PhD and a Masters in Planning from USC.

Stephanie Ryberg-Webster is Associate Professor of Urban Studies in the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, where she also directs the Master of Urban Planning and Development program. Her research explores the complex intersections of historic preservation and urban development, including preservation (and demolition) in legacy cities, synergies and tensions between preservation and community development, federal and state historic rehabilitation tax credits, and the preservation of Cleveland’s African American heritage. Dr. Ryberg-Webster’s current work explores the 1970s-era history of historic preservation in Cleveland, as urban disinvestment escalated. Dr. Ryberg-Webster teaches courses in urban planning, historic preservation, urban design, and contemporary urban issues. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Historic Preservation from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Urban Planning from the University of Cincinnati.

J. Mark Souther is Professor of History at Cleveland State University. He is the author of Believing in Cleveland: Managing Decline in ‘The Best Location in the Nation,’ (Temple University Press, 2017) and New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (Louisiana State University Press, 2006, 2013), which won the Kemper & Leila Williams Prize from the Historic New Orleans Collection and Louisiana Historical Association and the Michael Thomason Gulf South History Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. He is co-editor (with Nicholas Dagen Bloom) of American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition (Center for American Places; University of Chicago Press, 2012). His next book project focuses on Georgia’s Fall Line cities of Augusta, Macon, and Columbus from Reconstruction to the present.

Susanna Schaller is Associate Professor in Urban Studies, Administration and Planning at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York. Her most recent work focuses on business improvement districts (BIDs) in Washington, DC.  Her book Business Improvement Districts and the Contradictions of Placemaking: BID Urbanism in Washington, D.C. was recently published by the University of Georgia Press. As a certified urban planner, her professional practice has focused on urban governance and economic development as well as small business development and microfinance.  She has served as Senior Planner to the Municipal Art Society in New York and has worked with community groups to evaluate rezoning plans for New York City neighborhoods. She has also worked with community-based organizations, including community development finance institutions and community development corporations, to develop microenterprise and small business lending and training programs and to conduct community visioning and strategic planning workshops. She earned her PhD in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University.

Morris “Mo” Speller is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation, Reckoning with Redlines examines the history of mortgage discrimination, predatory lending, racial segregation, and housing policy in St. Louis City from the 1930s-1970s. This longer history of redlining reveals practices through which lenders and city planners adopted the anti-redlining language of “community reinvestment” to promote activities that hardened lines of segregation in St. Louis. His other research interests include the history of queer communities and “gayborhood” politics in Baltimore and the history of Baltimore neighborhoods displaced by urban renewal. He has a Master of Science degree in Human Geography from University of Bristol and received his PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University in Fall 2020.

Sanjeev Vidyarthi is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Vidyarthi’s research interests include ideas and actions in the domains of spatial planning and design, planning history and theory, globalization and international planning. He studies who does (and should do) the planning work and some of the differences these efforts make. His projects involves helping actors and communities make better plans that bridge the many divides in society and improve the quality of urban life. His work as appeared in the Journal of Planning History, Town Planning Review, Planning Theory and Practice, and the edited collection Transforming Asian Cities, among other venues.

Domenic Vitiello, a historian and planner, is Associate Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research, teaching, and practice focus on immigrant communities, urban agriculture and food system planning, and community economic development. His books and articles include The Sanctuary City (Cornell UP, 2022 – open access); Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States (Penn Press, 2017), co-edited with Tom Sugrue; Engineering Philadelphia (Cornell UP, 2014); “The Planned Destruction of Chinatowns in the United States and Canada since c.1900,” in Planning Perspectives (2020), with Zoe Blickenderfer; and “The Hidden History of Food System Planning,”  in the Journal of Planning History (2014), with Catherine Brinkley. Domenic is Editor for the Americas for the journal Urban History, a member of the IPHS Council,and previously served on SACRPH’s board in the early 2000s.