Directory（CHRONOPOULOS THEMIS）

My research focuses primarily on urban studies and African American Studies since 1945 with an emphasis on inequality, globalization, popular culture, and public policy. I have previously been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, U.S.A., have taught at various universities in the United States and the United Kingdom, and have held a visiting position at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. I am the author of Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance (New York: Routledge, 2011), which was awarded the 2012 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize for the best first book in American Studies from the British Association for American Studies. I am also the coeditor of two edited collections. The first coedited with Jonathan Soffer is entitled After the Urban Crisis: New York and the Rise of Inequality (2017), and the second coedited with Christopher Agee is entitled Urban America and the Police Since World War II (2020). Both of them are published as special sections of the Journal of Urban History. I am currently researching and writing a number of articles and book chapters on African American Studies, housing, gentrification, and urban development. I have served in the Board of Directors of the Urban History Association and have been a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the United Kingdom.

I received a Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University in the United States. My research projects are based on archival, ethnographic, demographic, and public policy research. I began to design and implement ethnographic and archival projects in various African American and Latinx neighborhoods mostly in New York City in the late 1990s and early 2000. Eventually, I also conducted fieldwork in Latin American and Caribbean cities, notably in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, and Kingston, Jamaica. Initially, my research focused on cultural identity. However, in the course of time my research expanded and began exploring topics such as residential segregation, income disparities, spatial exclusion, the civil rights movement, urban governance, gentrification, and the criminal justice system. My methodology includes the reading of primary and secondary writings about these neighborhoods in libraries and archives; spatial analysis accompanied by the reading and making of maps; interviews, conversations, and observations recorded in notebooks; the use of quantitative data whenever appropriate; and the study of urban planning initiatives and their implementation. My findings are currently being transformed into academic articles and books. While some of the topics that I examine are contemporary, my goal is to always utilize a historical perspective in order to fully understand the origins and development of certain processes. Otherwise, my projects are interdisciplinary both in theory and method and seek to provide analyses and narratives that can be useful to other scholars, public policy makers, urban planners, students, communities,.I would like to work with students who are interested in urban studies, African American Studies, popular culture, and global cities from an interdisciplinary perspective.