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Suleiman Osman joined the department in 2006. He specializes in U.S. urban history, the built environment, U.S. cultural and social history, and the study of race and ethnicity, with a particular focus on the way urban space both shapes and is produced by culture and politics. His current project on the history of gentrification in Brooklyn explores the relationship between New York’s physical and symbolic cityscapes. Tracing the efforts of a new middle class to reinhabit and restore aging Victorian neighborhoods, Prof. Osman examines how Brooklyn’s declining commercial and industrial landscapes were recast as postindustrial sites of anti-bureaucratic authenticity. His manuscript, “Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification, Race and the Search for Authenticity in Brooklyn, 1950-1980,” is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. Prof. Osman is also pursuing a broader project that looks at 1970’s urban politics and culture. His recent chapter, The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Julian Zelizer and Bruce Schulman’s Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, offers an analysis of the “neighborhood movement” of the 1970s and traces the widespread and eclectic revolts against urban growth politics in New York, Boston and other cities in the 1970s. Prof. Osman is currently teaching courses on race and ethnicity in the American metropolis, American cityscapes, the 1960s, and several research seminars in urban history. Prof. Osman did his doctoral work in the American Civilization Program at Harvard University. He also has a BA in history from Yale College.
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