Peter Ekman is a cultural and historical geographer of urban America. He is currently a Clarence S. Stein Fellow at Cornell University's Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies, as well as a Visiting Scholar in Cornell's Department of City and Regional Planning. He has recently been 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 Mauk and Nunis Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. He has also been a lecturer at Sonoma State University, California's only public liberal-arts college. He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard 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. 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, Timing the Future Metropolis: Planning, Knowledge, and Disavowal in America's Postwar Urbanism, routes a transnational history of urban knowledge through the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, 1956–1976.
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. 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, Timing the Future Metropolis: Planning, Knowledge, and Disavowal in America's Postwar Urbanism, routes a transnational history of urban knowledge through the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, 1956–1976.