McNeur, Catherine
Catherine McNeur

Catherine McNeur

PhD, History, Yale, 2012

MPhil, History, Yale, 2008
MA, History, Yale, 2006
BA, Urban Design and Architecture Studies, New York University, 2003 


Profile:
Catherine McNeur is a Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellow at the New School and the New-York Historical Society.  She earned her Ph.D. in History from Yale University. McNeur’s manuscript, The “Swinish Multitude” and Fashionable Promenades, is an environmental history of Manhattan that investigates the ways New Yorkers fought over natural resources and public space during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Courses Taught:
  • Nature in Unexpected Places: The Environment in American History (Fall 2012)
  • We Are What We Eat: Food and Power in American History (Spring 2013)
Recent Publications:
  •  The “Swinish Multitude” and Fashionable Promenades: Battles over Public Space in New York City, 1815-1865 (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

  • Review of Precious Commodity: Providing Water for America’s Cities, by Martin V. Melosi, Planning Perspectives, (pending publication 2012).

  • Review of the exhibit Skin and Bones: Tattoos in the Life of the American Sailor at the Mystic Seaport Museum, Common-place (October 2011), http://www.common-place.org/vol-12/no-01.

  • “The ‘Swinish Multitude’: Controversies over Hogs in Antebellum New York City,” Journal of Urban History 37.5 (September 2011): 639-660.

  • “Hogs,” in The Encyclopedia of New York City (ed. Kenneth T. Jackson), 2nd edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

  • Review of Building Power: Architecture and Surveillance in Victorian America, by Anna Vemer Andrzejewski, Louisiana History 51 (Summer 2010): 375-377.

  • Review of 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front, by Andrew M. Shanken, Enterprise and Society 11.2 (June 2010): 425-427.

  • “On February 17, 1802, the New-York City Common Council announced a competition for the design of a new city hall,” The New York Journal of American History 66.1, (Spring/Summer 2005): 68-69.
 
Office Location:
80 5th Ave, Room 522
Office Hours:
Mondays 11am-12pm
Email:
mcneurc@newschool.edu

Research Interests:
Environmental history; public history; urban history; nineteenth-century social, cultural, and political history; the Industrial Revolution; the history of food; and the built environment
Professional Affiliations:
  • American Historical Association
  • Organization of American Historians
  • American Society of Environmental Historians
  • Urban History Association
  • New-York Historical Society
Recent Presentations/Exhibits:

 

  • Urban History Association Conference, New York, New York
    “New York City’s ‘Straggling Suburbs’: Shantytowns and Squatters in the Nineteenth Century”
    Panel Organizer
    Panel on the Environmental History of Urban Peripheries
    October 28-30, 2012

 

 

  • Guides Association of New York City
    “Clearing the Lungs of the City: New York’s Uptown Shantytowns and the Creation of Central Park”
    July 11, 2012

 

 

  • Conference on Environmental History at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
    “The Business of Manure in Antebellum New York City”
    April 17, 2010

 

 

  • Lecture for Introduction to Environmental History, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
    “The Industrial Revolution and Urban Growth”
    September 22, 2009

 

 

  • Organization of American Historians Conference, New York, New York
    “The ‘Swinish Multitude’: Controversies over Hogs in Nineteenth-Century New York City”
    Panel on Animal Agency
    March 28-30, 2008

 

 

  • American Society of Environmental History Conference, Boise, Idaho
    “The ‘Swinish Multitude’: Controversies over Hogs in Nineteenth-Century New York City”
    Panel on Urban Animals
    March 10-15, 2008

 

 

  • Draper Graduate Student Conference on Early American Studies, Storrs, Connecticut
    Imagining Environments: Navigating Space and Place in the Early Atlantic World
    “The ‘Swinish Multitude’: Controversies over Hogs in Nineteenth-Century New York City”
    Panel on Contested Urban Spaces
    September 28-30, 2006

 

 

  • Historic Districts Council, New York, New York
    “John McComb, Jr.: Architect of the Federalist Party”
    June 1, 2005

 

 

  • General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, New York, New York
    “John McComb, Jr.: Architect of the Federalist Party”
    November 3, 2004

 

Awards and Honors:
  • John Addison Porter Prize, Yale University, 2012
  • Samuel Thorpe Jones and Charles Jones Fellowship, Yale University, 2011-2012
  • Louis E. Voorheis Fellowship, Yale University, 2010-2011
  • John F. Enders Fellowship, Yale University, 2009
  • Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borderlands Research Fellowship, 2009
  • Beinecke Library Research Fellowship, 2008-2009
  • Beinecke Library Pre-Prospectus Summer Fellowship, 2007
  • Program in Agrarian Studies Research Grant, Yale University, 2007, 2009
CV (pdf):
CV

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