Book Talk | Daniel Wortel-London | The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on Wednesday, November 12 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with Daniel Wortel-London. He will discuss his book The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981 with Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Kim Phillips-Fein.
Daniel Wortel-London, PhD is a historian of American economic history. He earned his PhD in history from New York University in 2020, where he served as a Jefferson Scholar National Fellow at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, a Louis Galambos National Fellow in Business and Politics at the Hagley Museum and Library, a visiting scholar at the Urban Democracy Lab, and a Fellow at the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies. His research has been published in such outlets as the Journal of Urban History, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and in edited collections by the Columbia University Press, Jacobin, The Washington Post, and the New York Daily News. Dr. Wortel-London’s research interests grew from his work as a political advocate, having served as a policy coordinator at Civworld @ Demos, policy co-lead at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, and policy specialist at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, as well as town planning committee of Occupy Wall Street and the DSA.
Gianpaolo Baiocchi is a sociologist and an ethnographer interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He has written about and continues to research instances of actually existing civic life and participatory democracy. While much of his research and writing has been about Brazil, his most recent book, The Civic Imagination (co-authored with Elizabeth Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Stephanie Savell, and Peter Klein) examines the contours and limits of the democratic conversation in the US today. His most recent research, with Ernesto Ganuza, has been about the global travel and translation of blueprints of urban participation in the current era. An engaged scholar, Baiocchi was one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project and continues to work with groups improving urban democracy. He heads Gallatin’s Urban Democracy Lab, which launched in 2014 and which provides a space for scholars and practitioners to collaborate and exchange ideas for cultivating just, sustainable, and creative urban futures.
Kim Phillips-Fein is Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, and Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, The New York Times, The New Republic and The Nation. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation and the NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.