Professor of History Alison Isenberg, a distinguished scholar of urban life and co-founder of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities, died Oct. 23. She was 63.
A public memorial and celebration of Isenberg’s life will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 6, at the University Chapel.
Isenberg joined the Princeton faculty in 2010 and helped lead Princeton’s teaching and research in urban studies for more than a decade. She was known as an innovative collaborator who brought together faculty and students across disciplines, and as a scholar who made deep connections with the communities she studied, including Trenton, New Jersey, the site of her pioneering public humanities project on the uprisings of the 1960s.
“Beyond her role as a distinguished urban historian, Alison had a penchant for opening up academic spaces to new participants,” said Department of History Chair Angela Creager, the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in the History of Science.
Creager continued: “I witnessed this in her founding of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities; her teaching and documentary filmmaking on urban history and public policy with Purcell Carson; and her pioneering work as a public historian excavating the long-term effects of social unrest and police violence in Trenton after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.”
