Jan Lin is Professor of Sociology at Occidental College and previously taught at the University of Houston and Amherst College. He received a BA from Williams College (1983), an MS from the London School of Economics (1984), and a PhD from the New School for Social Research (1992). He is author of Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change (1998), The Power of Urban Ethnic Places: Cultural Heritage and Community Life (2011) and The Urban Sociology Reader (2nd edition, co-edited with Christopher Mele, 2012). He was Principal Investigator for a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for the Northeast Los Angeles Community Outreach Partnership Center (1999-2002). His book, Taking Back the Boulevard: Art, Activism and Gentrification in Northeast Los Angeles was published in 2019 by New York University Press. His writing and students’ work on gentrification is featured online in Los Angeles KCET-Departures.
Johana Londoño is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latina/o Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She holds a PhD in American Studies from NYU and a BFA from The Cooper Union. Her research interests include barrios, race and space, Latinx culture and communities, and built environments and design. Her first book, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in US Cities (Duke University Press 2020), is the recipient of the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Latina/o Studies Section of LASA and a pre-production grant from the Graham Foundation. Londoño has been a fellow with the Ford Foundation; Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities; Northeast Consortium for Faculty Diversity; and Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program.
Nancy Raquel Mirabal is Associate Professor of American Studies and U.S. Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Mirabal earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan and has published widely in the fields of Afro-diasporic, gentrification, and spatial studies. She is the author of Suspect Freedoms: The Racial and Sexual Politics of Cubanidad in New York, 1823-1957 (NYU Press, 2017) and co-editor with Deborah Vargas and Larry LaFountain Stokes, of Keywords for Latina/o Studies (NYU Press, 2018). Her next project examines the politics of archival spaces, visuality, dissonant discourses, and spatial inquiry. She is a recipient of the Scholar in Residence Fellowship, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; The University Chancellor Postdoctoral Fellowship for Academic Diversity, U.C. Berkeley, Department of Ethnic Studies; the International Migration Postdoctoral Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (SSRC); and served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians (OAH) from 2005-2010.
Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research focuses on the areas of race/ethnicity, urban sociology, and culture including work documenting how neighborhood racial composition contributes to where, when, and how gentrification unfolds.
Aaron Shkuda runs the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, a program that fosters collaboration between scholars studying urban life and the built environment. Aaron received his PhD in United States urban history from the University of Chicago and is the author of The Lofts of Soho: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (Chicago, 2016). He has published articles on subjects ranging from arts-focused retail districts to the architecture and planning behind Battery Park City. He previously held positions at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Universities.
Tom Slater is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Edinburgh, and he has held fellowships at the University of Trento, Italy, the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the University of Chile (Santiago). He has research interests in the institutional arrangements producing and reinforcing urban inequalities, and in the ways in which marginalized urban dwellers organize against injustices visited upon them. He is the author of 4 books and over 75 scholarly articles on gentrification, displacement from urban space, territorial stigmatization, critical urban theory, and urban social movements. His work has been translated into 9 different languages. His 5th book, Shaking Up The City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question, a dissection of mainstream approaches to urban studies, will be published this September by the University of California Press. For more information, see https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/tomslater/
Brandi T. Summers is assistant professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. Her book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how aesthetics and race converge to map blackness in Washington, D.C. and the way that competing notions of blackness structure economic relations and develop land in the gentrifying city. Her current research explores how uses of space and placemaking practices inform productions of knowledge and power in Oakland, California. Dr. Summers has published several articles and essays that analyze the relationship between race, power, aesthetics, and urbanization that appear in both scholarly and popular publications, including New York Times, The Boston, Globe, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), Public Books, and The Funambulist. Dr. Summers is a member of the Editorial Collectives at City and ACME, and is on the editorial boards of Urban Geography, AAG Review of Books, cultural geographies, Environment & Planning F, and City & Community.
Francisco Vieyra is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in African & African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis and received a PhD in Sociology from New York University. Francisco’s research falls into two main areas: black solidarity, survival, and empowerment and qualitative methodology. At the heart of his work is a book in progress examining the political life of one of Brooklyn’s most marginalized black neighborhoods. It focuses on how everyday residents become politicized and how they generate local change.
Molly Vollman Makris, Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Urban Studies, holds a PhD in Urban Systems, with concentrations in Urban Educational Policy and the Urban Environment. Dr. Makris won the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Critics’ Choice Book Award and the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Book Award in 2016 for her first book, Public Housing and School Choice in a Gentrified City: Youth Experiences of Uneven Opportunity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Her newest book, Gentrification Down the Shore (Rutgers University Press), co-authored with Dr. Mary Gatta, was released in 2020. Her articles have appeared in the Peabody Journal of Education, Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Cultural Geography, and Journal of Education Policy. Dr. Makris’ research and teaching have been featured in The Takeaway, The 74 Million, The Progressive, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Daily News, and Chalkbeat to name a few.
Timothy Weaver is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is author of Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), co-editor with Richardson Dilworth of How Ideas Shape Urban Political Development (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), and has published articles in the Labor Studies Journal, Studies in American Political Development, Urban Studies, the Urban Affairs Review, and New Political Science. He is the President-Elect of the Urban and Local Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.