Brian D. Goldstein
Brian is a historian of the American built environment and an associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Art and Art History at Swarthmore College. Previously, he was assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico and an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Humanities and the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2013.
Brian’s research and teaching focus on the history of urbanism, architecture, and planning, especially in the United States in the twentieth century. Specifically, he examines the intersection of social movements, political ideology, and the built environment; the formal and spatial implications of race and class; debates over design expertise and professional identity; the history of architectural and planning education; and the history of community-based organizations. Broadly, his work explores how people of different races and ethnicities, economic classes, and levels of formal training have imagined and shaped the future of American places.