Dylan Gottlieb
Bio:
Dylan Gottlieb is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Princeton University, where he studies cities and capitalism in the twentieth-century United States. His research explores the effects of financialization on work, leisure, neighborhoods, and politics. 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. His work has been published in the Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, Utne Reader, the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, 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.
