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 book, Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2026. It reveals how the emergence of a new highly-educated class—young urban professionals, or “yuppies”— fostered new forms of work, leisure, and politics, transformed cities, and, ultimately, produced our current age of inequality. In the 1980s, the financial sector experienced explosive growth, unseating industry at the center of the American economy. This new order gave rise to a new kind of worker: the yuppie. They may not have been the plutocrats directing the course of financialization, but yuppies were the soldiers on the front lines who enacted this new mode of accumulation, trade by trade and deal by deal. At banks, they extracted profits from the husks of industrial companies, forever destabilizing the structures that had provided stable employment for the middle and working classes. At law firms, they devised the mergers and takeovers which eroded the power and wages of those same workers. As consumers, yuppies created a new culture that legitimated their position atop the stratified society they had made. As city-dwellers, they were handmaidens to an extreme and even deadly stage of redevelopment. And as donors and voters, yuppies engineered a takeover of local and national politics, using their wealth to back candidates who would remake society in their image. Yuppies were, in short, not just a stereotype. They were the authors of a more unequal chapter in American life.
My dissertation was awarded the 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 Raymond A. Mohl Award from the Urban History Association and the 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.