I am a professor of history (and American studies) at the University of Iowa. I specialize in the cultural history of the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, focusing on:
- The experience of time and space in modernity, especially in cities
- Memory and monument studies
- Urbanism, architecture, and the built environment more broadly
- Visual culture, especially photography
- Sound and soundscapes
- The representation of cities
- The history of technology
- Material culture studies
My first book, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 (University of Chicago Press, 2009) challenges the myth that ruins were absent or insignificant objects in nineteenth-century America. Ranging across cities and cultural genres, the book recovers a variety of American ruins that disrupted traditional, Eurocentric conceptions of time and history.
In my second book, Remembrance of Things Present: The Invention of the Time Capsule and the Politics of Posterity (University of Chicago Press, June 2019), I explore the ideas, hopes, and anxieties that prompted Americans in the Gilded Age and Progressive era to forge this new memorial practice of dispatching messages and artifacts to a predetermined future date via some kind of sealed container.
My third book, From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: C. G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway (Columbia University Press, March 2026), explores the social and spatial history of New York City through the lens of a little-known amateur photographer. Hine spent a whole year roaming Broadway – from Bowling Green all the way up to Inwood – in search of architectural, social, and botanical specimens to preserve in a three-volume album before they were swept away by urban development. I have produced an “interactive map” website to accompany this book: https://skyscrapertowildflower.com/
I am also the general editor of a six-volume series, The Cultural History of Time (Bloomsbury, forthcoming, 2026). This series takes a broad approach to the growing field of “temporality studies,” examining changes in the organization, experience, and representation of time across the globe, from antiquity to the present. Unlike other scholarship on time, this series considers all temporal scales, from the fractional to the cosmic. And rather than focusing just on clocks and calendars, it considers a variety of temporal devices and artefacts, along with bodily and generational rhythms, and historical and prospective time.
I have also published essays in American Quarterly, American Literary History, Winterthur Portfolio, Journal of American Studies, American Nineteenth Century History, American Art, and History of Photography, as well as chapters in edited collections such as the Cultural History of Memory in the Nineteenth Century.
At University of Iowa, I have taught undergraduate seminars on the History of Time in America; Digital History; American History through Things: Material Culture; American Disasters; American Business Cultures; American Cityscapes; Apocalyptic Movements and Visions in the US; Fame and Celebrity in America; as well as the lecture course, Understanding American Cultures. His graduate seminars include: History, Theory, and Interpretation; Theory and Practice of American Studies; Cultures of American Architecture; Money and American Culture; Temporality in American History; Monuments, Memorials, and Memory in America.
nick yablon 