Biography
I am an urban geographer and photographer working as a Serra Húnter Professor of Geography of the Universitat de Barcelona. I was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where I remain an Affiliated Researcher. This followed some years as a Research Fellow at the Department of Geography (UAB) and the Centre d'Estudis Demogràfics, and as a Visiting Professor and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. I am also Research Associate with Deindustrialization and the Politics of our Time (DePOT).
Before relocating to Barcelona, I was Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Geography at the City University of New York (CUNY), also affiliated with the Queens College MFA in Social Practice program and was founder and co-Director of the Queens College City Lab.
I have also worked as Lecturer in Urban and Community Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, as a youth programs educator at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, and at the Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University.
I hold a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Manchester, a MRP in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University, and a BA in Sociology from Clark University, having also studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Cornell, and Fuga (Barcelona).
My academic work focuses on deindustrialization and urban redevelopment, landscapes of urban infrastructure, political debates about urban heritage and preservation, gentrification and migration, just transitions, visual methods, and the spatial and cultural politics of urban transformation in Great Britain, the United States, and Spain.
Many of these themes overlap with my arts practice. I have exhibited my photographic work internationally, was an Artist in Residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship with the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Aside from my individual creative work, I had a longstanding photographic collaboration, Site Unseen, with artist Adam Ryder. From March to July, 2022, I held a solo photographic exhibition called Industrial Obelisks at the Barcelona History Museum (MUHBA).
I was raised in Connecticut (USA) and am a first-generation university graduate. Coming of age in a place where social inequality is so stark and spatially delineated led me to want to study issues surrounding social justice and urbanism. Living in various cities in New England and the Mid-Atlantic piqued my interest in the socio-spatial processes of urban deindustrialization which led me to Manchester, England, and I have since focused on this theme in a comparative, international context.
I am interested in the experience and representations of the city, urban imaginaries, and thinking of the built environment as a dynamic artifact of social relations. I try to work with, and make my research available to, activists fighting for their right to the city.
This site is an attempt to highlight my academic and creative work. Since they often overlap, this is an imprecise endeavor. I am okay with that.
Image courtesy of Adam Ryder
Presenting at Gentrification & Displacement Conference, Boston University, 2023.
Image courtesy of Loretta Lees.