Francesca Ammon

Francesca Russello Ammon is an associate professor of city and regional planning and historic preservation in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies the history of the built environment, focusing on the social, material, and cultural life of cities in the twentieth-century United States. Her book, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape, won the Lewis Mumford Prize for the best book in American planning history. Ammon is currently a colloquium member of the Penn/Mellon Foundation Humanities + Urbanism + Design Initiative. She is on the board of the Society for American City & Regional Planning History (SACRPH).

Before joining the PennDesign faculty, Ammon was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She has also held the Sally Kress Tompkins Fellowship, jointly sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) and the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). While completing her Ph.D. in American studies, she held a fellowship as a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities and was the John E. Rovensky Fellow with the Business History Conference. Ammon was the 2010-2011 Miller Center Ambrose Monell Foundation Funded Fellow in Technology and Democracy.