Dylan Gottlieb
Bio:
Dylan Gottlieb is a lecturer in the Department of History at Princeton University, where he works on cities and capitalism in the twentieth-century United States. His in-progress book manuscript, Yuppies: Wall Street and the Remaking of New York (Harvard Univ. Press) explores the effects of financialization on work, leisure, neighborhoods, and politics.
Dylan’s dissertation was awarded the 2021 Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History from the Business History Conference. His dissertation research also received the Raymond A. Mohl Award from the Urban History Association. In 2019-20, he was a National Fellow at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia. His research has been supported by the American Historical Association, Urban History Association, and Temple University.
Dylan graduated from Vassar College in 2008; in 2013, he received an M.A. from Temple University, and in 2015, he received an M.A. from Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2020. His work has been published in the Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, The Washington Post, Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, Utne Reader, Gotham, and Public Seminar.
Thesis Description:
Yuppies: Young Urban Professionals and the Making of Postindustrial New York
Dylan Gottlieb’s dissertation, “Yuppies: Young Urban Professionals and the Making of Postindustrial New York” reveals how an influx of highly-educated workers—young urban professionals, or “yuppies”—transformed New York City, fostered new forms of work, leisure, and politics, and, ultimately, helped to produce America’s current age of inequality. Financialization, Gottlieb argues, was not some abstract process: it wrought immediate effects on cities, culture, and party politics during the closing decades of the twentieth century. His research shows how the rise of the financial and professional economy was fostered by a range of institutions, from universities and business schools to investment banks and municipal governments. It explains how financialization was embodied in yuppies’ consumer, lifestyle, and fitness practices. It reveals how yuppies remade the ideological and fundraising base of the Democratic Party. And it links the growth of Wall Street with the speculation, arson-for-profit, and displacement that swept cities in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Yuppies, Gottlieb argues, were the shock troops of the financialization of American life.
