Brief biographies of the speakers in this class are presented below.
Richard Sennett is University Professor of the Humanities at New York University and Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. His many books include Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, The Conscience of the Eye, The Fall of Public Man, and The Uses of Disorder.
Julian Beinart is Professor of Architecture at MIT. His teaching and research center on the form and design of cities. He currently heads Cambridge International Design Associates, and has served as a designer and consultant on projects in the Middle East, Southern Africa, and Asia, as well as in the United States.
Henry Jenkins is the Director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program and the Ann F. Friedlaender Professor of the Humanities.
He has a Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, The Children's Culture Reader, and Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasure of Popular Culture. He is the co-director of the Media in Transition project.
Anne Beamish is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. Her research interests center on designing on-line environments and how information technology can support both virtual and physical communities, collaborative work, and institutional learning.
Thomas J. Campanella is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. His fields of research encompass American landscape history, the geography of new media technology, and emerging urbanism in Southeast Asia. His writing has appeared in Wired, Metropolis, Harvard Design Magazine and other publications.
John de Monchaux is Professor of Architecture and Planning and former Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. He has worked as an urban designer on six continents, and was the Founding Chairman of the Boston Civic Design Commission.
Briavel Holcomb is Professor of Urban Studies and Community Health at Rutgers University. She is a geographer whose research has focused on issues related to urban redevelopment, gender and, more recently, tourism. Among her recent book chapters are two on reconstructing images of industrial cities, and forthcoming chapters on marketing cities for tourism and on gender and the heritage industry. Her 1972 doctoral dissertation used Kevin Lynch's image maps to compare the Denver of African American, Chicano and Anglo high school students.
Eugenie Birch is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where she chairs the department. She is past president of both the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. She is the author of The Unsheltered Woman, Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City, and Editor of the Urban Studies and Planning section of the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
David Lowenthal is Professor Emeritus of Geography at University College London and Visiting Professor of Heritage Studies at St. Mary's University College, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. His writing discusses the relationship among history, heritage, memory, and preservation, and his books include The Past is a Foreign Country and The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. His revised biography of the pioneer American conservationist George Perkins Marsh will be published in 1999.
Dennis Frenchman is Professor of the Practice of Urban Design at MIT. He is a founding principal and Vice President of ICON architecture, Inc., and his award-winning practice has focused on the transformation of older, underutilized areas of cities, including many nationally significant historic places and regions.
Edward (Ned) W. Hill is Professor in Urban Studies and Public Administration at Cleveland State University's Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs. His books and articles focus on economic development finance, public education policy, and regional labor markets, and he is editor of the journal Economic Development Quarterly, which is dedicated to publishing research on the development of the American economy.
Patricia Burgess is Director of Planning and Urban Design Services at the Urban Center at Cleveland State University. She has written widely about the history of real estate development and zoning, and is the author of Planning for the Private Interest: Land Use Controls and Residential Patterns in Columbus, Ohio, 1900-1970.
Ruth Durack is Director of the Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio, and Associate Professor at Kent State University. She is an award-winning urban designer who worked for many years at Wallace Roberts & Todd in Philadelphia, and served as that firm's Director of Urban Design for its West Coast office.
Larry R. Ford is Professor of Geography at San Diego State University. His research deals international variations in urban form, urban architecture and social change, and the image of cities in film and music. He is the author of Cities and Buildings: Skyscrapers, Skid Rows, Suburbs.
J. Mark Schuster is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He is a public policy analyst who specializes in the analysis of government policies and programs with respect to the arts, culture, and environmental design. He is the author of numerous books and reports including: Preserving the Built Heritage: Tools for Implementation (with John de Monchaux and Charles Riley), and Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts Policy (with Michael O'Hare and Alan Feld), and Supporting the Arts: An International Comparative Study.
Dolores Hayden is Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University. An architect and urban historian, her books include The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, Redesigning the American Dream, and Seven American Utopias.
Alex MacLean, trained as an architect, is an aerial photographer, and principal of Landslides. His photographs are widely used as teaching tools throughout the United States and have been published in Look at the Land (with Bill McKibben) and Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (with James Corner), winner of the 1997 American Institute of Architects Book of the Year Award.
Judith Martin is Morse-Alumni Professor and Director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. Her books and articles address a broad range of urban phenomena, ranging from efforts to negotiate metropolitan consciousness to studies of suburbia, shopping malls, and urban renewal.
Sam Bass Warner, Jr. is Visiting Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and was formerly William Edwards Huntington Professor of History at Boston University and Jack Meyerhoff Professor of Environmental Studies at Brandeis. His many books include Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston 1870-1900, The Private City, Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth, and The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City.
Lawrence Vale is Associate Professor of Urban Design at MIT. His research is devoted to interpreting the history, politics, and sociology of urban design. He is the author of two books examining government-sponsored environments, including Architecture, Power, and National Identity, an award-winning study of capital cities and parliamentary districts. He is completing two books about American public housing policy and design.