History Department Faculty
Michael Glass
Assistant Professor, Director of the Honors Program
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; political history; urban history; environmental history; race and capitalism; inequality.
Department
Biography
Michael Glass is a political and urban historian of the twentieth-century United States, specializing in race, metropolitan development, and capitalism. His research examines how financial systems generate inequality and shape everyday life, from housing and education to environmental risk.
His first book, Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book chronicles how home mortgages and municipal bonds built postwar suburbs while making them financially fragile, and how these debt instruments entrenched disparities that continue to shape American life.
He is also co-author of “Building Inequality: Mapping the Spatial and Racial Inequalities of FHA Section 608 Rental Housing, 1942-1950,” a digital humanities project that maps thousands of federally insured apartment complexes and examines their role in deepening residential segregation. His articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, the Journal of Urban History, and in a forthcoming edited collection on the recent history of New York City. He has also written essays for the Washington Post, Phenomenal World, and other popular outlets.
Glass is currently working on a new book project, Up in Flames: Real Estate and Wildfires in Southern California, which traces how a century of reckless housing development turned wildfire into a recurring disaster.
His research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Scholars Fellowship, and the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation. Before graduate school, he worked as a public high school teacher in New York City.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming in October 2025)
“Hidden Apartments: Informal Housing in Metropolitan New York,” in New Histories of New York City Since the 1960s, eds. Johanna Fernandez, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Mason B. Williams (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming in 2026).
“Mortgaging Out: FHA Credit Policy, Segregated Rental Housing, and the Remaking of Metropolitan America,” Journal of American History 112, no. 1 (June 2025): 64-91, co-authored with Brent Cebul.
“The Frail Bonds of Liberalism: Pensions, Schools, and the Unraveling of Fiscal Mutualism in Postwar New York,” Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics (forthcoming summer 2021), 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.