Samuel Zipp
Assistant Professor, American Civilization and Urban Studies:
American Civilization; Urban Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 2896
Samuel_Zipp@brown.edu
My current work offers a new look at the politics and culture of urban renewal in Manhattan in the twenty years after World War II. I focus on the ways that superblock planning and modernist architecture remade the cityscape of the postwar city and were themselves remade by resistance to their overweening imposition on the lives of ordinary New Yorkers. Urban renewal, I show, was at the heart of New York's simultaneous rise to "world city" status and fall into the "urban crisis."
Biography
Samuel Zipp is an urban and cultural historian with particular interest in 20th century intellectual and political history, the built environment, United States history since World War II, and nonfiction writing. He has written articles and reviews for a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reviews in American History, The Baffler, Metropolis, American Studies International, Southern California Quarterly, Cabinet, and In These Times. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Right now, he is at work on a book called Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York, to be published by Oxford University Press.
Interests
My writing and research concerns the cultural, intellectual, and political history of the United States in the 20th century, with a current focus on urbanism in the years since World War II. My book project, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York, argues that urban renewal in New York is best understood as more than a set of national or municipal policies. I believe that it was also a highly contested vision and cultural symbol, one that was shaped by its interactions with the political culture of the domestic Cold War. In the postwar era the term "urban renewal" came to be understood, by both its proponents and its critics, as a symbol of the way that superblock urban planning and modernist architecture was remaking the daily lives of city-dwellers. Specifically, I look at four iconic postwar sites—the United Nations Headquarters complex, Metropolitan Life's middle-income housing development Stuyvesant Town, the vast belts of public housing in East Harlem, and the Lincoln Square renewal area that included Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts—and show how they were physically and culturally constructed as agents and emblems of urban transformation. I explain how they were pitched as cures for urban obsolescence, depicted as symbols of a new city, and received by New Yorkers as reorderings of the fundamental experience of city life.
Awards
Franke Interdisciplinary Fellowship, Yale Univ., Sept. 2000- May 2004
University Fellowship, Yale Univ., Sept. 1999- May 2004
Presidential Fellowship, George Washington Univ., 1997- 1999
Affiliations
American Studies Association
Organization of American Historians
American Historical Association
Urban History Association
Teaching
I teach courses in 20th century urban and suburban history, the history and meaning of the built environment, politics and culture in New York City since 1945, popular music and the city, and United States politics and culture in the 20th century.
Funded Research
Graham Foundation for the Advanced Study of the Fine Arts, 2009
Rockefeller Foundation, Archive Center Research Grant, 2005
Enders Research Fellowship, 2004