Peter Ekman is a cultural and historical geographer of urban America. He is Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he received his Ph.D. in 2016. In 2017, he was Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., and then E. Peter Mauk, Jr., and Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. He has also lectured at Sonoma State University, California's only public liberal-arts college. He maintains broad-based interests in urban form and urban life during America’s long twentieth century, in the intellectual histories of planning and urbanism, in social and geographic thought, in materiality and material culture, in temporality and historiography, in histories of knowledge and expertise, and in questions of ruination. He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard College. Articles of his have appeared in the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of Planning History. He is at work on two book manuscripts. One is based in part on his dissertation, "Suburbs of Last Resort: Landscape, Life, and Ruin on the Edges of San Francisco Bay," which was supported by a long-term fellowship from the Bancroft Library. The second routes a transnational history of postwar urban knowledge through the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, 1956–1976.