I am a Professor of Architecture and History at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I received my education at Yale University (BA, magna cum laude in History, 1988) and from the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1995). I am the author or editor of eight books: The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 (University of Chicago Press, 1999), which won the Spiro Kostof Award of the Society of Architectural Historians, for the best book on architecture and urbanism; The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction (Yale University Press, 2008); Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Environment (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, co-edited with Steven Conn); Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (Routledge, 2003, co-edited with Randall Mason); The Future of Higher Education (Routledge, 2011, with Dan Clawson); Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (Planners Press, 2011, co-edited with Tim Mennell); Campus Guide to the University of Massachusetts (Princeton Architecture Press, 2013, with Marla Miller; Memories of Buenos Aires: Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) Bending the Future: 50 Ideas for the Next 50 Years of Historic Preservation (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), and Why Preservation Matters (Yale University Press, 2016). I write for a variety of publications about New York City, urban development, and the politics of the past. For the hundredth anniversary of Times Square in 2004, I was curator for an exhibition on the history of the Square at the AXA Gallery in New York City. I am a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, Fulbright Commission, and Guggenheim Foundation. In 2014, I was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
I can be reached at mpage@umass.edu
My current CV is here.