Research & Writing Projects

My current research is a monograph entitled “Hot Town: How New York City Built Its Climate Crisis.”

City summers can be joyful. But summer heat has long been a complex problem of infrastructure, economy, policy, and community. This project examines how extreme heat has shaped New Yorkers’ lives for more than 150 years. By the mid-1800s, New York’s builders knew that they were exacerbating how the city absorbed and stored solar radiation—its urban heat island effect—and that low-income and non-white communities faced unequal exposure to heat each summer. To address thermal inequalities, health experts, reformers and city leaders considered tree canopy, ventilated tenements, and pools, while business leaders embraced climate control technology. Yet many New Yorkers could neither afford air conditioning nor easily access cool pools and green spaces. In exploring the collision of rising global temperatures with the existing urban heat island, “Hot Town” tells a story of lived experience and science that explains the historical origins and contemporary stakes of the accelerating climate crisis.

Part of this work stems from my collaboration on the project “Melting Metropolis”.

“Melting Metropolis: Everyday Histories of Health and Heat in London, New York, and Paris since 1945”

Wellcome Trust Discovery Award, 2022

Urban heat raises a host of health problems. Heatwaves are torrid manifestations of how high temperatures disrupt urban life, especially for the most marginalized, and they bring issues of climate injustice into stark relief. Yet extreme temperatures are only one aspect of urban heat and health, a changing relationship that has impacted past and present communities. This project brings together a team of scholars, a community engagement manager, and a participatory artist to transform understandings of urban heat and health. It explores the history of high temperatures in the postwar era, taking three global cities as its focus: London, New York and Paris. Drawing on and contributing to studies on climate justice, it investigates how Londoners, New Yorkers and Parisians have experienced heat and sought to mitigate its impact on their health and wellbeing. Community engagement (CE) is threaded throughout the project and informs how the project team seeks to rethink understandings of urban heat by moving beyond a focus on 'resilience.' In seeking to create new academic and non-academic conversations on the challenging interaction between the climate crisis and cities, it will provide fresh perspectives on urban history, environmental history, the medical humanities, and emotional and sensory history.