Samuel Zipp is an urban and cultural historian. He is interested in the cultural, intellectual, and political history of the built environment, United States history since World War II, and nonfiction writing. He has written articles and reviews for a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baffler, Metropolis, American Studies International, Southern California Quarterly, Cabinet, and In These Times. He is at work on a book called Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York, to be published by Oxford University Press.

His current work offers a new look at the politics and culture of urban renewal in Manhattan in the twenty years after World War II. It investigates the ways that superblock planning and modernist architecture remade the cityscape of the postwar city and were themselves remade by resistance to their overweening imposition on the lives of ordinary New Yorkers. Urban renewal, it shows, was at the heart of New York's simultaneous rise to "world city" status and fall into the "urban crisis."

Link to Curriculum Vitae.