番茄社区

Rebecca Marchiel

Associate Professor of History

Rebecca Marchiel

Dr. Rebecca Marchiel is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at 番茄社区.

Research Interests

Dr. Marchiel is an historian of urban history, political history, and the history of American capitalism. She is interested in the relationship between financial institutions and ordinary people in the United States, the rise of an affordable housing policy regime in the 20th century, and housing discrimination and financial exploitation in the era after civil rights victories. In 2020, she published her first book, After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation. 

She is currently writing a book that explores the emergence of "affordable housing" as a policy priority in the late 20th century.

Biography

Dr. Rebecca Marchiel earned her MA (2008) and PhD (2014) in history from Northwestern University. She taught U.S. history at Franklin and Marshall College for one year before joining the UM faculty in 2015.

Publications

book cover of a woman holding a banner

The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation

From the publisher:

Focusing on Chicago’s West Side, After Redlining illuminates how urban activists were able to change banks’ behavior to support investment in communities that they had once abandoned.

American banks, to their eternal discredit, long played a key role in disenfranchising nonwhite urbanites and, through redlining, blighting the very city neighborhoods that needed the most investment. Banks long showed little compunction in aiding and abetting blockbusting, discrimination, and outright theft from nonwhites. They denied funds to entire neighborhoods or actively exploited them, to the benefit of suburban whites—an economic white flight to sharpen the pain caused by the demographic one.

Selected Article(s):

"The Keys to Ensuring a New Anti-Redlining Initiative Succeeds,” Washington Post, November 15, 2021.

 Journal of Urban History, June 20, 2018.

Education

Ph.D. History, Northwestern University (2014)

M.A. History, Northwestern University (2008)

Recognitions

  • Fellowship, Harvard University鈥檚 Charles Warren Center, 2015-2016