Jeffrey Trask
Assistant Professor History- Biography
Jeffrey Trask is an Assistant Professor in the History Department, specializing in urban history and the cultural and intellectual history of the United States, with a particular focus on the relationship between cities and the arts. Drawing from interdisciplinary training in history, geography, design and material culture, Dr. Trask examines the history of the urban built environment in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His research seeks to understand the deployment of cultural capital in the politics and economics of city building, focusing on the histories of cultural institutions, private-public partnerships, preservation and gentrification.
The courses Dr. Trask teaches uses the city of Atlanta as a pedagogical resource, teaching students how to read spaces historically. In most courses, he incorporates experiential assignments that get students out into the city’s streets, public buildings and community spaces to explore local history and to anchor concrete examples in the built environment to more theoretical or abstract concepts that we explore in discussion of readings within the classroom. Students learn that their everyday surroundings have been shaped and reshaped for specific political, economic and social reasons.
- Publications
- Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era. The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
- “’The Loft Cause’ or ‘Bohemia Gone Bourgeois’? Artist Housing and Private Development in Greenwich Village” Journal of Urban History (November, 2015).
- “The Frame of New York: Commerce and Beauty on the Waterfront and the Battle Over Thirteenth Avenue,” accepted and scheduled for publication, October 2018 in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
- Smokestacks and Silos: The Industrial Aesthetic and the Transformation of Urban Space in New York, Atlanta and Chicago (for submission to the University of Pennsylvania Press).
- “Walking Back the Beltline: The Landscape of New South Industry” (for submission to the Journal of Planning History).
- “Southern Cultural Capital: Opera and the Politics of Race in Cold War Cities,” (for submission to the Journal of Urban History).