Alison Ellen Isenberg, professor of history at Princeton University, passed away on October 23. She was 63 years old.
A native of Hartford, Connecticut, Dr. Isenberg earned her bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University. After graduation, she worked in urban planning for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. She later earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation focused on the rise, fall, and transformation of downtowns across the United States.
Dr. Isenberg’s career in academia began as a faculty member at Florida International University. She went on to teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Rutgers University in New Jersey before beginning her tenure at Princeton in 2010.
Over the next 15 years, Dr. Isenberg became one of Princeton’s leading scholars on urban studies. In 2013, she co-founded the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities – a multidisciplinary research, teaching, and public-engagement program. She also led the university’s urban studies program from 2012 to 2014. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Isenberg mentored both undergraduate and graduate students. She received Princeton’s Graduate Mentoring Award in 2024.
Dr. Isenberg’s research led to several scholarly publications, including Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay (Princeton University Press, 2017). At the time of her passing, Dr. Isenberg was completing the editing process of her next book, Uprisings. The monograph, which examines the life of Harlan Joseph, a 19-year-old Lincoln University student who was shot by police in 1968 in Trenton, New Jersey, is expected to be published posthumously by Princeton University Press.