Alison Isenberg

Alison Isenberg is Professor of History at Princeton University, where she is founding co-director of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and Humanities. She is author of Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay (2017), which received the 2018 PROSE Award for Architecture & Urban Planning, and a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize. Her first book Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (2004) received awards in preservation, planning, history, and public humanities, including the Ellis Hawley prize from the Organization of American Historians. Her current book project, Uprisings, takes the April 1968 “riots” in Trenton, New Jersey as its starting point, offering a window into the volatile weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. She is collaborating with filmmaker Purcell Carson on a related documentary. Isenberg is finishing a longer-term book, Second-Hand Cities: Race and Region in the Antique Americana Trade, from the Civil War to Urban Renewal. She previously taught at Rutgers University, University of North Carolina, and Florida International University. She worked as a planner for the New York City Parks Department and in affordable housing in the South Bronx before getting a Ph.D. in History.