Dreaming Home: Cultural Imagination and Racial Realities of Home Ownership
Owning a home is one of the most powerful symbols of the American Dream: a vessel with which Americans can start a family, grow vibrant communities, and build intergenerational wealth. But the history of American home ownership is riddled with inequalities, racism, myopic polices, and economic disasters like the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007.
How can we better understand the reality of home ownership in America—its economic, sociological, and racial histories, as well as the cultural productions that shape our imagination of what it means to own a home?
In this Dean’s Salon, Deborah L. Nelson, dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, will explore the complexity of American home ownership and housing inequalities in the city of Chicago with the sociologist Robin Bartram and the cultural theorist Adrienne Brown, two preeminent scholars who have researched and written widely about these issues. Topics will include the racialized nature of home ownership, systemic extractions of wealth, and the allure of property—with the aim of generating clarity and new perspectives on re-imagining more equitable, holistic, and sustainable housing solutions for Chicago and other American cities.
Please join us for this special hybrid event on February 25, 2025, at 6:30 p.m. (CST). You can participate via Zoom or in person at the Green Line Performing Arts Center, part of UChicago’s Arts + Public Life in Washington Park. The in-person event will include a reception.
Event Schedule:
6:00 PM: Pre-Reception
6:30–7:30 PM: Program
7:30–8:15 PM: Reception
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Deborah L. Nelson is the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English and dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Her book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Best Book of 2017 and the Gordon J. Laing Award in 2019 for the most distinguished contribution to the University of Chicago Press by a faculty member. She is also the author of Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (Columbia University Press, 2001) and articles published in PMLA, American Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Feminist Studies, and several edited collections. She is a founding member of the research collective Post45.
Adrienne Brown is Associate Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity and English and the Director of Arts + Public Life. She specializes in American and African American cultural production in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the history of racial perception. She is the co-editor of Race and Real Estate (2015) and the author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race ( 2017) and The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (2024).
Robin Bartram is Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and an Affiliated Scholar with the American Bar Foundation. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of sociology, urban studies, and policy, with a focus on housing, inequality, and regulatory systems. She is the author of Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality (2022). Prior to joining the Crown Family School, she was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tulane University.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/2868064-0
Virtual: https://go.evvnt.com/2868064-2
