Francesca Russello Ammon is a cultural historian of the built environment. Her research focuses on the social, material, and cultural life of American cities, from World War II to the present. She is especially interested in the processes and consequences of urban renewal, the influence of war on postwar planning and design, the dynamic relationship between cities and nature, and the ways that visual culture has shaped understanding of what cities are, have been, and should be. 

Professor Ammon is assistant professor of City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches courses on planning history, historical research methods, cities and sound, and photography and the city. On this last topic, she recently organized a two-day symposium at PennDesign titled "Picturing Policy: How Visual Culture Shapes the Urban Built Environment."

Outside of the classroom, Professor Ammon is a colloquium member of the Penn/Mellon Foundation Humanities + Urbanism + Design Initiative, an Andrew W. Mellon DH Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and a Faculty Fellow of the Penn Institute for Urban Research. During 2016-17, Professor Ammon is a Mellon Researcher with the Canadian Centre for Architecture's Architecture and Photography initiative. She also serves on the board of the Society for American City & Regional Planning History (SACRPH).

Before joining Penn, Professor Ammon was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She previously earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University, her Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) at Yale School of Architecture, and her B.S.E. in civil engineering at Princeton University.

This lecture is part of P+ARG's Emerging Voices Lecture Series. P+ARG is comprised of research students in both Urban and Regional Planning and Architecture. Our main purpose is to enhance the social and academic experiences of research students in the college.