Book Talk | Bench Ansfield | Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge and the NYU History Department on Wednesday, March 4 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Bench Ansfield. They will discuss their book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, with Johanna Fernandez and Tom Sugrue.

Bench Ansfield is a historian of racial capitalism, the carceral state, and twentieth-century U.S. cities. They are an Assistant Professor of History at Temple University, and they hold a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Their book, Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (W. W. Norton), was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2025 by the New York Times and one of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year by Kirkus. Born in Flames examines the wave of arson-for-profit that coursed through the Bronx and scores of U.S. cities in the 1970s. Their peer-edited articles have also appeared in Antipode and in the collection, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke 2015), edited by Katherine McKittrick. Bench worked as a researcher on the PBS-aired documentary Decade of Fire (2019), and they curated a digital exhibition with the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. They’ve also written for the New York Review of Books, Jewish Currents, and the Washington Post’s Made by History series, along with other popular publications. They are a longtime member of the veteran transformative justice organization Philly Stands Up, and their writing on that work can be found in Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan’s volume, Fumbling Towards Repair as well as the journal Tikkun. Their research has been supported by an ACLS Fellowship, a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Jefferson Scholars National Fellowship, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

Ingrid Gould Ellen is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and Faculty Director at the NYU Furman Center. She is currently the President-Elect of the Association for Public Policy and Management and previously served as the president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. Professor Ellen has written numerous peer-reviewed articles related to housing policy, neighborhood change, and segregation.  She is also author of Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Harvard University Press, 2000), co-editor of How to House the Homeless (Russell Sage, 2010), and co-editor of The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation and Opportunity (Columbia University Press, 2019).  Professor Ellen has held visiting positions at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. 

Thomas J. Sugrue is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History and the founding Director of Cities Collaborative at New York University.  He is the author of four books, including Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, and editor of five others. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and Salon. He is a frequent commentator on modern American history, politics, civil rights, and urban policy. Sugrue has given over 450 public lectures throughout the United States and in Argentina, Canada, England, France, Germany, and Japan.