History Department Faculty
Michael Glass
Assistant Professor, Director of the Honors Program
Michael Glass
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S355
Telephone: 617-552-6137
Email: michael.glass.2@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., University of Chicago
- M.S., City College of the City University of New York
- M.A., Hunter College
- Ph.D., Princeton University
Research Interests
Twentieth-century United States; political history; urban history; environmental history; race and capitalism; inequality.
Department
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, 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 shape American life.
He is also co-author of 鈥�,鈥� 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 , , the , 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 Wildfires 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.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
鈥淗idden Apartments: Informal Housing in Metropolitan New York,鈥� in New Histories of New York City Since the 1960s, eds. Johanna Fernandez, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Mason B. Williams (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming in 2026).
鈥�,鈥� Journal of聽 American History 112, no. 1 (June 2025): 64-91, co-authored with Brent Cebul.
鈥�,鈥� Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics (forthcoming summer 2021), co-authored with Sean H. Vanatta.
鈥�,鈥� Journal of Urban History 44, no. 6 (November 2018): 1197-1226.聽 聽