Aaron Shkuda
Project Manager, Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities
Aaron Shkuda is the Project Manager of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, a program that fosters collaboration between scholars studying urban life and the built environment. Its goals include encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations across campus, developing team-taught courses with project-based outcomes and/or experiential components, and fostering research and teaching which examine cities through a transnational, comparative/connective lens. More information on the initiative can be found here: http://arc-hum.princeton.edu/.
Aaron received his PhD in United States urban history from the University of Chicago and is the author of The Lofts of Soho: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (University of Chicago Press, April 2016). He has published articles on subjects ranging from arts-focused retail districts to the architecture and planning behind Battery Park City. Previously, Aaron served as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught classes in architecture, fine arts, and history. He also launched Stanford University’s ITALIC (Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture) program, a residentially-based, interdisciplinary first-year arts and humanities immersion program for freshmen.
Selected Publications
- Building the Financial Capital of the World: Trading Securities and Commodities in New York, Chicago, and New Jersey, 1960-2001 (Under Contract with the University of Chicago Press)
- The Lofts of Soho: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
- “‘Out With the Galleries, Out with the Sellouts:’ Arts Organizations and Real Estate Investment in Los Angeles and Detroit,” European Journal of American Cultural Studies, Summer 2023
- “’Exciting Alternatives to Demolition:’ The Shifting Meanings of Preservation in New York’s SoHo” in Max Page and Randall Mason, eds., Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States, 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2019)
- Guest Editor (w/Julia Foulkes), “Dancing in the Streets: The Arts in Postwar U.S. Cities,” special section of The Journal of Urban History, November, 2015
- Author, The Artist as Developer and Advocate: Real Estate and Public Policy in SoHo, New York
- "Housing the 'Front Office to the World:' Urban Planning for the Service Economy in Battery Park City, New York," Journal of Planning History, August 2014
- "The Art Market, Arts Funding, and Sweat Equity: The Origins of Gentrified Retail," Journal of Urban History, July 2013
- "Review Essay: Art, Artists, and the Image of the Twentieth-Century City," Journal of Urban History, May 2011
