People

Penn IUR is affiliated with more than 200 experts in the field of urbanism. Its Faculty Fellows program identifies faculty at the University of Pennsylvania with a demonstrated interest in urban research; the Penn IUR Scholars program identifies urban scholars outside of Penn; and the Penn IUR Fellows program identifies expert urban practitioners. Together, these programs foster a community of scholars and encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration.

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Faculty Fellow

Randall Mason

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Professor, Historic Preservation

About

Randall Mason is Associate Professor in the Department of Historic Preservation in the School of Design. His courses focus on historic preservation planning, urban conservation, history, and cultural landscape studies. Mason’s research interests include theory and methods of preservation planning, cultural policy, the economics of preservation, historic site management, the history and design of memorials, and the history of historic preservation. He leads the Center for Research on Preservation and Society, which undertakes applied research projects on site management and on social, economic and political aspects of historic preservation. Before joining the Penn faculty in 2004, Mason worked as Senior Project Specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute, researching economic and social issues relating to heritage conservation. Previous positions include Assistant Professor and Director of Historic Preservation at the University of Maryland, and adjunct faculty in landscape architecture at RISD. His professional experience includes several years of consulting practice and co-founding the nonprofit research group Minerva Partners (which develops projects to strengthen the connections between heritage conservation and social development). He serves on the Board of Directors of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, and was the 2012-13 National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize winner at the American Academy in Rome.

Selected Publications

Mason, Randall. 2012. “Broadway as a Memory Site.” In The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, edited by Hilary Ballon. New York City: Columbia University Press.

Mason, Randall. 2009. The Once and Future New York: Historic Preservation and the Modern City. University of Minnesota Press.

Page, Max and Randall Mason, eds. 2004. Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States. Routlege.

Affiliated PhD Student

Samuel Ostroff

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Joint Doctoral Candidate in History and South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania

About

Samuel Ostroff is a joint Doctoral Candidate in History and South Asia Studies at Penn. He is currently writing his dissertation on the economic, environmental and imperial aspects of the Indian Ocean pearl trade in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the field of urban studies, his work focuses on port-cities and urban networking across oceanic and global spaces in the early modern world. Aside from his dissertation research, Samuel is interested in urban planning, transportation, and policy in the global cities of the 21st century. Prior to Penn, Samuel completed his B.A. in History at Bucknell University and M.A. in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University.

 

Faculty Fellow

Wendell Pritchett

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James S. Riepe Presidential Professor of Law and Education

School/Department

Areas of Interest

    About

    Wendell Pritchett is a Presidential Professor in the Law School and the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. An award-winning scholar, author, lawyer, professor, and civic and academic leader, he first joined the Penn Law faculty in 2002, serving as Interim Dean from 2014-15 and as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2006-07. He served from 2009-14 as Chancellor of Rutgers University-Camden, leading unprecedented growth that included graduating classes of record sizes, the first campus doctoral programs, and new health education and science facilities. In the City of Philadelphia, he has been Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Policy for Mayor Michael Nutter, Chair of the Redevelopment Authority, member of the School Reform Commission, President of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, Board Chair of the Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, and Executive Director of the district offices of Congressman Thomas Foglietta, among many other board and leadership positions. He has served as President of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, a board member of the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, Co-Chair of Mayor Nutter’s Transition Committee, and Co-Chair of Barack Obama’s Urban Policy Task Force. His research examines the development of post-war urban policy, in particular urban renewal, housing finance, and housing discrimination. 

    Selected Publications

    Pritchett, Wendell, Jessie Brown, and Martin Kurzweil. 2017. “Quality Assurance in U.S. Higher Education: The Current Landscape and Principles for Reform” Ithaka S+R and Penn Program on Regulation.

    Petrilla, John, Barbara Cohn, Wendell Pritchett, Paul Stiles, Victoria Stodden, Jeffrey Vagle, Mark Humowiecki, and Nastassia Rosario. 2017. “Legal Issues for IDS Use: Finding a Way Forward.” Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy.

    Pritchett, Wendell. 2008. Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Pritchett, Wendell and Mark Rose, guest editors. 2008. “Politics and the American City, 1940-1990.” Journal of Urban History 34.

    Pritchett, Wendell. 2002. Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Faculty Fellow

    Simon Richter

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    Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor of German

    Department Chair, Germanic Languages and Literatures

    About

    Simon Richter is Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor of German and member of the Graduate Groups in Comparative Literature and Religious Studies, fellow of the Penn Institute of Urban Research, faculty advisory board member of the Water Center at Penn and affiliated with the Programs in Cinema Studies, Environmental Humanities, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. Courses he has recently taught include: “Water Worlds: Cultural Responses to Sea Level Rise and Catastrophic Flooding”; “Forest Worlds: Mapping the Arboreal Imaginary”; “Writing in Dark Times”; “Erinnerungsorte/Places of Memory”; and “Floating/Sinking: Phenomenologies of Coastal Urban Resilience.” From 2014-2019, Richter directed a hybrid online/study abroad course called “Comparative Cultures of Sustainability in Germany and the Netherlands,” which involved an intensive study visit to Berlin and Rotterdam. 

    Simon's research focuses on cultural aspects of the climate emergency, especially with regard to resilience, adaptation, and sustainability in Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States. As an environmental humanist, Richter engages in activities that blur distinctions between traditional scholarship, urban design, and environmental activism. In 2018/19, he was a member of One Resilient Semarang, an international team of urban designers, hydrological engineers, ecologists, and urban and environmental activists from Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States.

    Selected Publications

    “Goethe’s Faust and the Ecolinguistics of ‘Here,’” in German Ecocriticism, ed. Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan (NY: Palgrave, 2017).

    “Betting on Water: The Hydrological Moment in Goethe’s Faust,” in Design in the Terrain of Water, ed. Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha (San Francisco: APD / ORO Editions, 2014).

    Fellow

    Inga Saffron

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    Architecture Critic, The Philadelphia Inquirer

    About

    Inga Saffron writes about architecture, design and planning issues for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her popular column, “Changing Skyline” has been appearing on Fridays in the paper’s Home & Design section since 1999. In 2012, she completed a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She received a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and in 2010 received the Gene Burd Urban Journalism Award.

    Prior to her current role, Saffron spent five years as a correspondent in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union for The Inquirer. She covered wars in the former Yugoslavia and in Chechnya, and witnessed the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny. It was in part because of those experiences that she became interested in the fate of cities and began writing about architecture.

    Saffron began her journalism career as a magazine writer in Ireland and worked for the Courier-News in Plainfield, N.J., before joining The Inquirer in 1985 as a suburban reporter. She is the author of Becoming Philadelphia: How an Old American City Made Itself New Again, published by Rutgers University Press in 2020, and Caviar: The Strange History and Uncertain Future of the World's Most Coveted Delicacy, published by Broadway Books in 2002.

    Emerging Scholar

    Moritz Schularick

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    Professor of Economics and Economic History, University of Bonn

    Areas of Interest

      About

      Moritz Schularick is Professor of Economics and Economic History at the University of Bonn and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London and the CESifo Research Network. In 2015/16, he held the Alfred-Grosser-Chair at SciencesPo in Paris. Previously, Schularick taught at the Free University of Berlin and was a visiting professor at New York University and the University of Cambridge. Working at the intersection of macroeconomics, international economics and economic history, his research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of International Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Economic History, and several other journals. My research is currently supported by grants from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, VolkswagenStiftung, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

      Affiliated PhD Student

      Sudev Sheth

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      PhD Candidate in South Asia Studies and History, University of Pennsylvania

      About

      Sudev J Sheth is a doctoral student in the Departments of South Asia Studies and History at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation titled A historical ethnography of statecraft and governance in Baroda, c. 1700−1949 investigates connections between agrarian economies, finance capital, and provincial state building in western India during the dissolution of the Mughal Empire and the rise of British colonial rule. Sudev also researches historical transformations in boundary and land use in the urban villages of contemporary New Delhi.

       

      Penn IUR Scholar

      Harris M. Steinberg

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      Executive Director, Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation

      About

      Harris M. Steinberg is the newly appointed Executive Director of the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Architecture at Drexel University. He acted as the founding Executive Director of PennPraxis and an Adjunct Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning in the School of Design. PennPraxis is the clinical arm of the School of Design, with the mission of fosteromg faculty and student collaboration on real world projects across the school’s five disciplines: architecture, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, historic preservation and fine arts. From 2003 until 2006, Harris was the Director of the Center for Innovation in Affordable Housing Design. He was a Lecturer at PennDesign from 1998 to 2003 and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in PennDesign’s Architecture Department from 2003 to 2006. Harris’ professional experience includes work at Venturi Raunch Scott Brown and Geddes Brecher Qualis Cunningham. He was the founding partner of Steinberg & Schade Architects and Steinberg & Stevens Architects. Harris’s work at PennPraxis focuses on large-scale civic conversations about thorny urban design challenges.  From 2006 to 2007, he led the landmark Civic Vision for the Central Delaware Riverfront, which brought more than four thousand Philadelphians together to build a vision plan for seven miles of Philadelphia’s Delaware riverfront. The project changed planning history and culture in Philadelphia and ushered in a new era of waterfront development for the city. He subsequently led the creation of Green2015 for the City of Philadelphia, an action plan to add 500 acres of park to the city by 2015, and most recently released the More Park, Less Way report to activate the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Harris is currently working on a vision and action plan for Fairmount Park—a project that looks at how to update and transform a 2400-acre, nineteenth-century watershed park for the twenty-first century.

      Selected Publications

      Steinberg, H.M. “On the Role of the Public and the Press in the Creation of a Civic Vision for the Central Delaware.” P. Latz and  R. Gessler (eds.) Entwicklung von Analyse- und Methodenrepertoires zur Reintegration von altindustriellen Standorten in Urbane Funkionsraume n Fallbeispielen in Deutschland und den USA. Technical University of Munich, 2010: 397-407.

      Steinberg, H.M. “Philadelphia in the Year 2059.” S.G. Knowles (ed.) Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009: 112-144.

      Daniels, T.L. and Steinberg, H.M. “Lessons from Sri Lanka.” E.L. Birch and S. Wachter (eds.) Rebuilding Urban Places after Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006: 244-255.

      Sokoloff, H.J., Steinberg H.M. and Pyser, S.N. “Deliberative City Planning on the Philadelphia Waterfront.” J. Gastil and P. Levine (eds). The Deliberative Democracy Handbook. Jossey-Bass, 2005: 185-196.

      Affiliated PhD Student

      Rachael Stephens

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      PhD Candidate in the Anthropology Department

      About

      My main interests are U.S. political economic inequity, social change (in relation to politicization, ideology, discourse, etc.), and social ethics. l am committed to trying to better understand—and more effectively transgress—the ways we learn to continually re-make our inequitable realities. I examine how many of us—particularly those who identify as “liberal”—learn to construct the “causes” of various social dynamics in ways that disavow our complicity in and responsibility for its “solutions.”  I also consider how normative social scientific knowledge production is itself grounded in analytical paradigms that make it frighteningly easy to reproduce inequity.  

      My dissertation explores these dynamics as they are manifested in the concrete interactions that sustain the so-called “real estate market,” property relations (including valuation and taxation), public finance (especially school finance), and perhaps most especially, the public discourses that narrate such phenomena. This focus also allows me to consider contemporary technologies of social differentiation (particularly race-making and related taxonomies of citizenship) as they relate to the late liberal mode of production and to the social ethics with which it is enmeshed. 

      Faculty Fellow

      Mark Stern

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      Professor of Social Policy and History

      Principal Investigator, Social Impact of the Arts Project

      School/Department

      Areas of Interest

        About

        Mark Stern is Professor of Social Policy and History. He is also is founder and principal investigator of the Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP), a research group at Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice. Since 1994 Stern had led project-based inquiry, with support largely by external private and public funders, that conceptualizes culture and the arts as integral to social wellbeing and develops methods for measuring the impact of this sector on community life in Philadelphia and other U.S. cities. Stern holds a Ph.D. in history from York University in Toronto, Canada and a B.A. from Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

        Selected Publications

        Stern, Mark and Susan C. Seifert. 2017. The Social Wellbeing of New York City’s Neighborhoods: The Contribution of Culture and the Arts. SIAP Research Report.

        Stern, Mark. 2011. Age and Arts Participation: A Case against Demographic Destiny. National Endowment for the Arts monograph.

        Stern, Mark and Susan C. Seifert. 2014. Communities, Culture, and Capabilities: Preliminary Results of a Four-­City Study. SIAP Research Report.

        Stern, Mark and Susan C. Seifert. 2013. Cultural Ecology, Neighborhood Vitality, and Social Wellbeing—A Philadelphia Project. SIAP Research Report. 

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