 Laura Delgado, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies
Professor Delgado is an urban planning scholar and former practitioner. She received a Master in City Planning and a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she previously worked for the City of Boston researching affordable housing, homeownership, land use, and abandoned properties. Her research focuses on housing and community development, including the role of community-based organizations and public agencies, in U.S. cities. Her most recent research looks at public libraries and how they draw on community resources to facilitate immigrant integration at the neighborhood level. Previously, her research has addressed the foreclosure crisis, gentrification, and homelessness.
Professor Delgado has experience teaching housing and community development, research methods, urban planning history and theory, and GIS at MIT and Boston University. As a teacher, she values discussion-based classes and encourages students to incorporate experiential learning into their coursework. |
 Shoshana Goldstein, Visiting Assistant Professor of Urban Studies
Professor Goldstein is an academic and urban planner with a master’s in international affairs from the New School, where she focused on the comparative urban development experiences of India and China, and a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University, with specializations in international planning, South Asian History, and Landscape Architecture. Her research investigates histories of urban planning in India and North America, exploring themes of mobility justice, housing precarity, and placemaking among marginal and migrant communities.
Prior to earning her doctorate, Professor Goldstein worked for the India China Institute and as a consultant for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and UNICEF. She has taught intro and advanced GIS for planners, courses on migration, infrastructure, and housing. As a teacher, she promotes student-led inquiry, interdisciplinary and applied perspectives, and methods in the classroom. |
 Arianna King, Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Studies
Arianna J. King holds a Ph.D. in Urban Studies (2023) from Tulane University’s City, Culture, and Community Program. Prior to doctoral study, she earned a B.A. in Philosophy and Fine Arts (2006) from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and an M.S. in Urban Studies (2015) from the University of New Orleans with a focus in Urban Planning & Urban Anthropology. Dr. King is committed to the use of interdisciplinary approaches that combine historical, geographical, and anthropological theories and methods to explore our global urban world and the everyday practices of ordinary people in cities.
Her teaching philosophy is grounded in people-centered research that helps students better understand the intersections between urban studies, gender studies, market trading, urban planning policy, and public space. Arianna is currently working on a manuscript based on her dissertation: Beyond the Market Walls: An Ethnography of Market Modernization in Cape Coast. |
 Garth Myers, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies and Director of the Center for Urban and Global Studies
Garth Myers earned a Ph.D. in Geography (1993) from UCLA with an allied field in Urban Planning. Myers has an M.A. (UCLA, 1986) in African Area Studies, with Geography and Urban Planning as the major and minor fields, and a BA with Honors in History from Bowdoin College, with concentrations in African and African-American History. He has taught at the University of Kansas, University of Nebraska-Omaha, Miami University (Ohio), California State University at Dominguez Hills, and UCLA.
His teaching philosophy rests on a belief in student engagement; the best learning takes place in engaged classrooms, where the professor facilitates student discussion and debate. Myers has conducted research in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Senegal, South Africa, Finland, China, Trinidad, Jamaica, and the UK over the past 30 years, as well as the US, and he sees strong feedback loops between research and teaching, in both directions. |
