Orriols Gimenez, Marc

Field: United States, Advisor: Phillips-Fein, Year: 2024

Hi! I’m Marc, I was born and raised in Barcelona, and I’m a PhD student working on contemporary US urban History. I'm interested in the ways in which, throughout the 20th century, Americans thought and felt about cities and suburbs, how they expressed those thoughts and feelings, and how all of this shaped the built environment that surrounds us, as well as an evolving, less tangible but equally consequential "sense of place." In my past scholarly projects, I have brought together policy proposals, neighborhood newsletters, and genre films in order to reconstruct historical visions of community and place. I hope to continue this type of work in my dissertation, researching the commodification of neighborhood identity and its role in the processes of gentrification that defined the late 20th-century "urban renaissance."

Unsurprisingly, in my free time I enjoy going on long walks around New York's neighborhoods and watching movies in the city's many arthouse cinemas.

Before starting my PhD, I earned an MPhil in American History with Distinction at the University of Cambridge, where I wrote a thesis on right-wing urbanist ideas in the New York of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. My research was funded by Pembroke College and the Faculty of History's Sara Norton grant. Prior to that, I graduated summa cum laude from Columbia, where I completed a dual BA program with Sciences Po, in France. My undergraduate major was Philosophy, which continues to be an intellectual influence for me, as I'm deeply interested in questions of normativity and determinism in History.