Thomas J. Campanella

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Thomas J. Campanella is a historian of city planning and the urban built environment. He teaches and writes about the culture-space nexus in a variety of contexts, seeking to explain the manifold agents, actors, and forces that have shaped urban landscapes around the world. Though primarily an Americanist, he has also studied and written about the extraordinary growth of Chinese cities in the post-Mao era.

Campanella has received Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the James Marston Fitch Foundation. His books include Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (2019), The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World (2008), and Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm (2003), winner of the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. He has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Nanjing University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Campanella holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999), an M.L.A. from Cornell University (1991), and a B.S. from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (1986).