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; 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 Suburban America (forthcoming in fall 2025 with the University of Pennsylvania Press), is a comparative history of race and class inequality in suburban Long Island. The book investigates how the debt instruments of home mortgages and municipal bonds created resource disparities between neighboring places, as well as triggered political struggles for affordable housing, tax equity, and school funding equalization.
He is also co-author of an ongoing digital history project, “Building Inequality: Redlining and FHA Rental Housing,” which maps the location of thousands of government-insured apartment projects and examines their relationship to residential segregation. The project will be made public in 2025.
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. Prior to 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 fall 2025)
“Mortgaging Out: FHA Credit Policy, Segregated Rental Housing, and the Remaking of Metropolitan America,” accepted with Journal of American History, anticipated publication in 2025, 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.
“Princeton’s Founding Trustees” and “Slavery and the 1820 Trustees,” Princeton & Slavery Project, November 2017.