My name is Dylan Gottlieb, and I write and teach about the history of American cities and capitalism as an assistant professor in the History Department at Bentley University.
My in-progress book manuscript, Yuppies: Wall Street and the Remaking of New York (under contract with Harvard University Press), reveals how the emergence of a new highly-educated class—young urban professionals, or “yuppies”—transformed cities, fostered new forms of work, leisure, and politics, and, ultimately, helped to produce our current age of inequality. In the 1980s, the financial and professional sectors unseated industry at the center of the American economy. This new order gave rise to new kinds of work and a new kind of worker: the yuppie. As they flocked to banks and law firms, yuppies remade white-collar America. They renegotiated middle-class gender roles and family structures. They reshaped daily routines of consumption and fitness. They remade local and national politics. And, as I describe in an article in the Journal of American History, their arrival visited dire consequences on cities, as landlords used arson to drive existing residents from gentrifying neighborhoods. Yuppies, I argue, became the shock troops for a newly-unequal era in American life.
My dissertation was awarded the 2021 Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History from the Business History Conference. Articles and papers drawn from my dissertation have received the 2016 Raymond A. Mohl Award from the Urban History Association and the 2021 Catherine Bauer Wurster Prize from the Society of American City and Regional Planning History. In 2019-20, I was a National Fellow at the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia. In 2021-2022, I held an NEH-Hagley Fellowship on Business, Culture, and Society at the Hagley Library. My research has also been supported by grants from the American Historical Association, Business History Conference, and the Graduate Fund for Excellence at Temple University.
My writing has been published in the Journal of American History, Enterprise & Society, Journal of Urban History, The Washington Post, Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, Utne Reader, the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Gotham, Public Seminar, as well as in a number of edited collections. I am also co-host of Who Makes Cents? A History of Capitalism Podcast. A complete list of my publications and presentations can be found on my CV.
I graduated from Vassar College in 2008. In 2013, I received an MA from Temple University, and in 2015, I received an MA from Princeton University. In 2020, I received my PhD from Princeton.
When I'm not working, I can be found playing guitar, baking sourdough bread, or hanging at the playground with my kids, June and Ruth.