Ben Gerlofs

Dr. Gerlofs works at the intersection of urban, cultural, political, and historical geography. His current projects are concentrated around three major foci: 1) the political economy of urbanization in historical perspective; 2) the dynamics of contemporary urban social movements; and 3) processes related to neighborhood change, including but not limited to gentrification. Much of his work has explored these issues in the dynamic hyper-metropolis that is Mexico City—the most populous urban area in the western hemisphere—whose historic neighborhoods are being demographically and aesthetically altered at an incredible rate, and whose systems of governance are on the edge of wholesale renovation as the city sheds the guise of the Federal District and is reborn as the State of Mexico City for the first time since the Mexican Revolution. His current book project, Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City, interrogates the multivalent transformations of the Mexican capital from the last years of the Porfiriato to the present, and he is in the process of developing new comparative urban research based in Hong Kong.

Education

• PhD Rutgers University (2012 — 2017)
• MA Syracuse University - Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs (2010 — 2012)
• BA Aquinas College (2008 — 2010)

Companies

• Assistant Professor of Geography The University of Hong Kong (2020)
• Postdoctoral Research Associate Princeton University (2018 — 2020)
• Visiting Assistant Professor Dartmouth College (2017 — 2018)
• SAS Excellence Fellow Rutgers University (2015 — 2017)
• Instructor, History Queens College (2013 — 2016)
• Affiliated Doctoral Student Instituto de Geografía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2015 — 2016)
• Teaching Assistant Rutgers University (2013 — 2015)
• SAS Excellence Fellow Rutgers University (2012 — 2013)
• Teaching Assistant Syracuse University (2010 — 2012)