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 the Ph.D. in 2016. In his postdoctoral work, he has been a Clarence S. Stein Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies, in Cornell University's Department of City and Regional Planning; and a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C.. He has also been a Mauk and Nunis Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; a McColl Fellow at the American Geographical Society Library; a lecturer in Geography, Environment, and Planning at Sonoma State University, California's only public liberal-arts college; and a lecturer in Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard University.
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 abandonment and ruination. Articles of his have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Planning History, Planning Perspectives, and History of the Human Sciences. He is at work on two book manuscripts. One, a longer-term project, 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 year-long fellowship from the Bancroft Library. The other, Timing the Future Metropolis: Planning, Knowledge, and Disavowal in America's Postwar Urbanism, is currently under review at a university press.
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 abandonment and ruination. Articles of his have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Planning History, Planning Perspectives, and History of the Human Sciences. He is at work on two book manuscripts. One, a longer-term project, 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 year-long fellowship from the Bancroft Library. The other, Timing the Future Metropolis: Planning, Knowledge, and Disavowal in America's Postwar Urbanism, is currently under review at a university press.