Suleiman Osman
Bio:
Suleiman Osman is associate professor of American studies at George Washington University. He specializes in U.S. urban history, the built environment, U.S. cultural and social history, and the study of race and ethnicity, with a particular focus on the way urban space both shapes and is produced by culture and politics. His book, “Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity,” was published by Oxford University Press in February 2011. A history of gentrification in Brooklyn, the book explores the relationship between New York’s physical and symbolic cityscapes. Osman is also pursuing a broader project that looks at 1970’s urban politics and culture. His recent chapter, “The Decade of the Neighborhood,” in Julian Zelizer and Bruce Schulman’s “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970’s,” offers an analysis of the “neighborhood movement” of the 1970’s and traces the widespread and eclectic revolts against urban growth politics in New York, Boston, and other cities in the 1970’s
Thesis Description:
The Birth of Postmodern New York: Gentrification, Post industrialization and Race in South Brooklyn from 1950 to 1980