Penn IUR Welcomes 2024-25 Fellows in Urban Leadership (2024)

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PhD Candidate in the History of Art Department

School/Department

• School of Arts and Sciences
• Department of History of Art

Areas of Interest

• Art
• History

About

Stephanie Gibson is an art/architectural historian and cultural critic interested in the ways in which groups and societies construct their monumental landscape. She holds a BAmagna cum laudefrom Emory University and an MA from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation looks at monuments of the Black Atlantic to examine the varied ways architects and other designers have responded to the large and important challenges of representing and repairing the trauma and loss suffered by these communities.Her work provides a theoretical framework, rooted in Black memory studies, for understanding the methods and techniques that are utilized in the creation of new monuments that memorialize trauma and pain in an effort to correct the historical record.

She has presented her work at conferences including the 5th Annual Wollesen Memorial Graduate Symposium,The Art of Passage: Transnational Encounters and the Convergence of Culturesat the University of Toronto and the 2021Bermuda Cultural Stakeholder Conference. Her paper “The Same but not Quite: An Exploration of the Mythology and Mimicry of the Bermudian Gombey Costume” was published in the peer-reviewed University of Toronto art journal,The Wollesen.

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Associate Professor

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• website
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School/Department

• Weitzman School of Design
• Department of City and Regional Planning

Areas of Interest

• Culture
• History
• Housing
• Urban and Regional Planning

About

Francesca RusselloAmmon is an Associate Professor of City and Regional Planningand Historic Preservationat the School of Design. Asa culturalhistorian of the built environment, her teaching, research, and writing focus on the changing shapes and spaces of the 20th- and 21st-century American city. She grounds her interdisciplinary approach to this subject on the premise that the landscape materializes social relations, cultural values, and economic processes. In particular, she is interested in the ways that visual culture informs planning and design, the dynamic relationships between cities and nature,andthe politics of place and space.

Before joining the School of Design faculty, Ammon was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has also held the Sally Kress Tompkins Fellowship, jointly sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). While completing her Ph.D. in American Studies, she held long-term fellowships as a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, Ambrose Monell Foundation Fellow in Technology and Democracy at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, and John E. Rovensky Fellow with the Business History Conference.

For the past year and a half, Ammon has been a Researcher on the Mellon Foundation-funded project on “Photography and/of Architecture” at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. She is also currently a colloquium member of the Penn/Mellon Foundation Humanities + Urbanism + Design Initiative, and she is a recent past fellow of Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

Ammon is on the board of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH).

Selected Publications

Ammon, Francesca Russello. 2016.Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape.New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ammon, Francesca Russello. 2015. “Post-Industrialization and the City of Consumption: Attempted Revitalization in Asbury Park, New Jersey.”Journal of Urban History41(2): 158-174.

Ammon, Francesca Russello. 2012. “UnearthingBenny the Bulldozer: The Culture of Clearance in Postwar Children’s Books.”Technology and Culture53(2): 306-336.

Ammon, Francesca Russello. 2009. “Commemoration Amid Criticism: The Mixed Legacy of Urban Renewal in Southwest Washington, D.C.”Journal of Planning History8(3): 175-220.

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Assistant Professor of Global Urban Inequalities, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley

Areas of Interest

• History
• Politics
• Urban and Regional Planning
• Urban Disparities

About

Sai Balakrishnan is an Assistant Professor of Global Urban Inequalitiesat theUniversity of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, she was an Assistant Professor in International Development at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, and served as a Postdoctoral Scholar at Columbia Law School’s Center on Global Legal Transformations. She has also worked as an urban planner in the United States, India, and the United Arab Emirates, and as a consultant to the UN-HABITAT in Nairobi.

Through her research and teaching, Balakrishnan focuses on processes of urbanization and planning institutions in the global south, and on the spatial politics of land-use and property. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Affairs, Pacific Affairs, Economic and Political Weekly, and in edited book chapters. Her book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India was published in 2019 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Balakrishnan holds a Master’s Degree in City Planning from MIT, a Master’s Degree in Urban Design from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in Urban Planning from Harvard University. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the 2014 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Gill Chin Lim Award for Best Dissertation on International Planning.

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Director of Health and Societies Major and Associate Professor

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School/Department

• School of Arts and Sciences
• Department of History and Sociology of Science

Areas of Interest

• Disease
• History
• International
• Public Health

About

David Barnes is an Associate Professor and Director of the Health and Societies Major in the Department of History and Sociology of Science in the School of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches the history of medicine and public health. Prior to joining Penn, Barnes taught for a year at the Institute for Liberal Arts at Emory University and for seven years in the History of Science Department at Harvard University. His current research is concentrated on the history of infectious disease, epidemiology, and public health; nineteenth-century urban European social and cultural history; and the politics of international disease control programs. He has a forthcoming book on the history of the Lazaretto Quarantine Station, located outside of Philadelphia.

Selected Publications

Barnes, David. 2014. “Cargo, ‘Infection,’ Cargo, and the Logic of Quarantine in the Nineteenth Century.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88(1).

Barnes, David. 2010. “Targeting Patient Zero.” In Tuberculosis Then and Now: Perspectives on the History of an Infectious Disease, 49-71, edited by Flurin Condrau and Michael Worboys. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Barnes, David. 2006. The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Barnes, David. 2002. “Scents and Sensibilities: Disgust and the Meanings of Odors in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques28: 21-49.

Barnes, David. 1 995. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France. University of California Press.

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Fellow in the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment

Doctoral Student in City and Regional Planning

School/Department

• Weitzman School of Design
• Department of City and Regional Planning

Areas of Interest

• Culture
• Environment
• History
• Urban and Regional Planning

About

Rachel Bondra is a doctoral student in City and Regional Planning and the inaugural Fellow in the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. As an historian of the built environment, she studies the social and cultural history of urban environments and planning in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States as they are reflected and embedded in the built environment, discards, and visual and material culture. Her research cultivates a process of reading waste as an avenue through which to understand urban and social transformation. Broadly, she is interested in how the urban landscape is a repository for historical narratives, how waste shapes the planning and management of the modern city, what the histories of landfills and waste facilities convey as a city changes over time, and how—and to what end—planning scholars and practitioners transform these sites for the future.

Her doctoral work is informed by her background in urban planning (Master of Urban Planning, CUNY Hunter College) and as an art and architectural historian (Bachelor of Arts, Ithaca College). Most recently Rachel was a Research Coordinator within the Office of Community Engagement and Inclusion at Barnard College in New York City where sheconducted research with a community partner in the Bronx andsupported college-wide infrastructure for engaged scholarship. She has also been a teaching assistant in the Urban Studies Department atBarnard and Columbiafor courses including Shrinking Cities, Neighborhood and Community Development, and Crisis Management and Municipal Government. Rachel is interested in public history and digital humanities at the intersection of her work as both an historian and scholar of urban planning.

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PhD Candidate, Department of History, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania

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School/Department

• School of Arts and Sciences
• Department of History

Areas of Interest

• Culture
• History
• Preservation

About

Michael Brinley is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include sovie history, modern russian history, historic preservation, citizenship and urban studies. Prior to coming to Penn, he received his MA from the University of Washington and hi BA from Pepperdine University.

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Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Education

Walter H. and Leonore C. Anneberg Professor in the Social Sciences

Director, Center for Africana Studies

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• website

School/Department

• School of Arts and Sciences
• Department of Sociology

Areas of Interest

• Education
• Race
• Urban Disparities

About

Camille Z. Charles is Walter H. and Leonore C. Anneberg Professor in the Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies, and Education, and Director of Center forAfricana Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests are in the areas of urban inequality, racial attitudes and intergroup relations, racial residential segregation, minorities in higher education, and racial identity.

Selected Publications

Kramer, Rory A., Brianna Remster, and Camille Z. Charles. In Press. “Black Lives and Police Tactics Matter.”Contexts, Summer: 20-25. (https://contexts.org/articles/black-lives-and-police-tactics-matter/).

Charles, Camille Z, RoryKramer,Kimberly Torres, Rachelle Brunn-Bevel. 2015. “Intragroup Heterogeneity and Blackness: Effects of Racial Classification, Immigrant Origins, Social Class, and Social Context on the Racial Identity of Elite College Students.” Race and Social Problems 7(4).
Kramer, Rory, RuthBurke, sand Camille Z. Charles. 2015. “When Change Doesn’t Matter: Racial Identity (In)consistency and Adolescent Well-being.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1(2).

Charles, Camille Z., Douglas S. Massey, Mary J. Fischer, and Margarita Mooney, with Brooke A. Cunningham, and Gniesha Y. Dinwiddie. 2009. Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Charles, Camille Zubrinsky. 2006. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Race, Class and Residence in Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage.

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Former Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Central Florida

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• website

School/Department

• Weitzman School of Design
• Department of City and Regional Planning

Areas of Interest

• History
• International
• Urban and Regional Planning

About

Caroline Cheong is a former assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on the relationship between urban heritage conservation and economic development, values-based conservation management, conservation economics and poverty reduction. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in City and Regional Planning, her MS in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and her BS in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. She was a US/ICOMOS International Exchange Intern in Al Houson, Jordan and a Graduate Intern at the Getty Conservation Institute where she evaluated the challenges and opportunities facing historic cities. Previously, Caroline was the Director of Research for Heritage Strategies International and PlaceEconomics through which she published numerous research reports and professional publications focusing on the economic impacts of historic preservation with Donovan Rypkema.

Selected Publications

Macdonald, Susan and Caroline Cheong. The Role of Public-Private Partnerships in Conserving Heritage Buildings, Sites and Historic Urban Areas: A Literature Review. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2014

Cheong, Caroline. Instruments for urban regeneration: Mixed-capital companies. (2014). Manuscript submitted for publication. Prepared for Eduardo Rojas.

Cheong, Caroline. Creative Cities and Place. (2013). Manuscript submitted for publication. Prepared for Donovan Rypkema, Erasmus University and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands.

Cheong, Caroline. Cruise Ship Tourism: Issues and Trends. Prepared for the World Monuments Fund for “Harboring Tourism: A Symposium on Cruise Ships in Historic Port Communities,” 2012.

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Assistant Curator, PENN Museum

PhD candidate in the History of Art Department

School/Department

• School of Arts and Sciences
• Department of History of Art

Areas of Interest

• Art
• History

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Martin Bucksbaum Professor of Real Estate, Fiance, Business Economic & Public Policy

Director, Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center

• email
• website

School/Department

• The Wharton School
• Department of Real Estate

Areas of Interest

• History
• Real Estate
• Urban and Regional Planning

About

Joe Gyourko is the Martin Bucksbaum Professor of Real Estate, Fiance, Business Economic & Public Policyand theDirector atZell/Lurie Real Estate Centerat The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as the Nancy Nasher and David Haemiseggar Director of the Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center at Wharton. Professor Gyourko’s research interests include real estate finance and investments, urban economics, and housing markets, in the United States and China. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and served as Co-Director of the special NBER Project on Housing Markets and the Financial Crisis. Professor Gyourko served as co-editor of the Journal of Urban Economics, is a past Trustee of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) and Director of the Pension Real Estate Association (PREA), and consults to various private firms on real estate investment and policy matters. He received his B.A. from Duke University and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Selected Publications

Gyourko, Joseph and Edward Glaeser. Forthcoming. “The Economics of Housing Supply.”Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Wu, Jing, Joseph Gyourko, and Yongheng Deng. 2016.“Evaluating the Risk of Chinese Housing Markets: What We Know and What We Need to Know.” China Economic Review 39: 91-114.

Gyourko, Joseph and Raven Molloy. 2015. “Regulation and Housing Supply.” In Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics Vol 5A, edited by Gilles Duranton, J. Vernon Henderson, and William Strange. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.

Gyourko, Joseph, Chris Mayer, and Todd Sinai. 2013. “Superstar Cities.” American Economic Journal-Economic Policy 5(4): 167-199.

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Associate Vice President and Founding Director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships

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• website

Areas of Interest

• History
• Philanthropy
• Race

About

Ira Harkavy is Associate Vice President and Founding Director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships. Harkavy teaches in the departments of history, urban studies, and Africana studies, and in the Graduate School of Education. As Director of the Netter Center since 1992, Harkavy has helped to develop academically based community service courses, as well as participatory action research projects, that involve creating university-community partnerships and university-assisted community schools in Penn’s local community of West Philadelphia. Harkavy is Chair of the National Science Foundation’s Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering (CEOSE); US Chair of the International Consortium on Higher Education, Civic Responsibility, and Democracy; and Chair of the Anchor Institutions Task Force. He has co-edited and co-authored seven books, and has written and lectured widely on the history and current practice of urban university-community-school partnerships and strategies for integrating the university missions of research, teaching, learning, and service. Among other honors, Harkavy is the recipient of the University of Pennsylvania’s Alumni Award of Merit, Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning, a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant, and two honorary degrees.

Selected Publications

Benson, Lee, Ira Harkavy, John Puckett, Matthew Hartley, Rita A. Hodges, Francis E. Johnston, and Joann Weeks. 2017.Knowledge for Social Change: Bacon, Dewey, and the Revolutionary Transformation of Research Universities in the Twenty-First Century.Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Bergan,Sjur, Tony Gallagher, and Ira Harkavy, eds. 2016.Higher Education for Democratic Innovation. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.

Harkavy, Ira. 2016. “Engaging Urban Universities as Anchor Institutions for Health Equity” editorial inAmerican Journal of Public Health. Washington, DC: American Public Health Association Publications. 106(12): 2155–2157.

Harkavy, Ira,Nancy Cantor, and Myra Burnett, “Realizing STEM Equity and Diversity through Higher Education-Community Engagement,” white paper based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant no. 1219996, January 2015, available athttp://www.nettercenter.upenn.edu.

Harkavy, Ira, Matthew Hartley, Rita Hodges and Joann Weeks. 2013. “The Promise of University-Assisted Community Schools to Transform American Schooling: A Report from the Field, 1985-2012.” Peabody Journal of Education88:5 (2013): 525-540.

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Penn Provost

Richard Perry University Professor

• email
• website

School/Department

• Annenberg School for Communication
• School of Arts and Sciences

Areas of Interest

• Media
• Race
• Sociology/Anthropology

About

John L. Jackson, Jr., is Walter H. Annenburg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Jackson received his BA in Communication (Radio/TV/Film) summa cum laude from Howard University (1993), earned his PhD in Anthropology with distinction from Columbia University (2000), and served as a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows (1999-2002). He is the author ofHarlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America(University of Chicago Press, 2001);Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity(University of Chicago Press, 2005);Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness(Basic Civitas, 2008);Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem(Harvard University Press, 2013);Impolite Conversations: On Race, Politics, Sex, Money, and Religion, co-written with Cora Daniels (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2014), andTelevised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment(NYU Press, 2016), co-written with Carolyn Rouse and Marla Frederick. His is also editor ofSocial Policy and Social Justice(2016), distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Press. His most recently completed film, co-directed with Deborah A. Thomas, isBad Friday:Rastafariafter Coral Gardens(Third World Newsreel, 2012). Jackson previously served as Senior Advisor to the Provost on Diversity and Associate Dean of Administration in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Selected Publications

Jackson, John L. 2016. Social Policy and Social Justice. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jackson, John L., Carolyn Rouse, and Marla Frederick. 2016. Televised Redemption:The Media Production of Black Muslims, Jews, and Christians. New York City: New York University Press.

Jackson, John L. and Cora Daniels. 2014. Impolite Conversations: On Race, Class, Sex, Religion, and Politics. New York City: Atria Books [Simon and Schuster imprint].

Jackson, John L. 2013. Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Jackson, John L. 2008. Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness.New York City: Basic Civitas.