Welcome to my website! I am a historian of the modern United States with a particular focus on the politics of cities and suburbs in the twentieth century. My research interests include the political economy of major infrastructure projects, movements for and against change to the built environment, and the ways in which sprawl and spatial segregation create social inequities. I received my PhD in history from Harvard University in 2023 and my BA (also in history) from Yale University in 2014. Currently, I am a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University.

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My forthcoming book, NIMBY Nation: The War on Growth That Created Our Housing Crisis and Remade American Politics, is the first history of the modern urban cost-of-living crisis, the origins of the liberal “NIMBY,” and their role in making the modern Democratic Party. The project is based on my doctoral dissertation, which won the International Planning History Society’s Anthony Sutcliffe Award, the Leo Ribuffo Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, and earned an honorable mention for the Urban History Association’s Michael Katz Award. You can read more about it here.

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Occasionally, I also write articles about history and public policy for various publications, some academic and others aimed at popular audiences. My writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Business History Review, The Week, Democracy, and other outlets. You can see a full list of my work here.

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Before academia, I worked first as a policy associate at the Century Foundation, a progressive nonpartisan think tank, and then on the communications team at TransitCenter, a grantmaking foundation that gives money to improve mass transit. Conveniently, they were located on different floors of the same building.