History Department Faculty
Michael Glass
Assistant Professor
Michael Glass
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S355
Telephone: 617-552-6137
Email: michael.glass.2@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., University of Chicago
- M.S., City College of the City University of New York
- M.A., Hunter College
- Ph.D., Princeton University
Research Interests
Twentieth-century United States; urban history; political history; race and capitalism; inequality.
Department
Biography
Michael Glass is a political and urban historian of the twentieth-century United States, with research and teaching interests in racism, capitalism, and inequality. His first book, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Postwar Suburbia (in progress, under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press), is a comparative history of race and class inequality in suburban America. The book investigates why borrowing for the basic needs of housing and education became a requirement in the postwar era. Focusing on the archetypal suburbs of Long Island, Cracked Foundations traces how these debt relationships created stark disparities between neighboring places, as well as how they triggered complex political struggles for affordable housing, tax equity, and school funding equalization.
Professor Glass’s research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship and the Woodrow Wilson Scholars Fellowship. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a public high school teacher in New York City.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
“The Frail Bonds of Liberalism: Pensions, Schools, and the Unraveling of Fiscal Mutualism in Postwar New York,” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics 2, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 427-472, co-authored with Sean H. Vanatta.
“From Sword to Shield to Myth: Facing the Facts of De Facto School Segregation,” Journal of Urban History 44, no. 6 (November 2018): 1197-1226.
“Princeton’s Founding Trustees” and “Slavery and the 1820 Trustees,” Princeton & Slavery Project, November 2017.