Michael Glass
Assistant Professor, Director of the Honors Program
Biography
Michael Glass is a political and urban historian of the twentieth-century United States, specializing in race, metropolitan development, and capitalism. His research examines how financial systems generate inequality and shape everyday life, from housing and education to environmental risk. His first book, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America was published with the University of Pennsylvania Press in October 2025. The book chronicles how home mortgages and municipal bonds built postwar suburbs while making them financially fragile, and how these debt instruments entrenched disparities that continue to structure American society. You can listen to Professor Glass discuss Cracked Foundations on a recent episode of Who Makes Cents? A History of Capitalism Podcast. (Links for Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Who Makes Cents website .) He is also co-author of “ Building Inequality: Mapping the Spatial and Racial Inequalities of FHA Section 608 Rental Housing, 1942-1950 ,” a digital humanities project that maps thousands of federally insured apartment complexes and examines their role in deepening residential segregation. His articles have appeared in the Journal of American History , Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics , the Journal of Urban History , and in a forthcoming edited collection on the recent history of New York City. He has also written essays for the Washington Post, Phenomenal World , and other popular outlets. Glass is currently working on a new book project, Built to Burn: Real Estate and the Making of Fire Disasters in Southern California , which traces how a century of reckless housing development turned wildfire into a recurring disaster. He is currently serving as Treasurer of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH), an interdisciplinary organization that brings together scholars and practitioners from urban history, American Studies, architectural history, urban planning, and historic preservation. His research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Scholars Fellowship at Princeton University, the Schoff Publication Fund at Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation. Before graduate school, he worked as a public high school teacher in New York City. Professor Glass welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in the history of capitalism, racial inequality, metropolitan development, and environmental disaster.