DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Biography

Eric Michael Rhodes is a doctoral student in U.S. History. His research interests include twentieth-century urban history; global political economy; the history of capitalism, labor, and technology; the United States and empire in world history; and transnational social history. A native of the midwestern Rust Belt, Eric is particularly interested in how late twentieth-century developments in political economy transformed North Atlantic cities and industrial regions as well as those in the urbanizing Global South. Eric is contributing Book Review Series Editor at The Metropole: The Official Blog of the Urban History Association. His forthcoming written works include a journal article on liberalism, fair housing, and the transition from the Great Society to New Federalism in deindustrializing Dayton; a journal article on environmental and political-economic inequalities in the postindustrializing cities of the Gulf Coast; an historiography of deindustrialization and the environment in postindustrial France; an annotated bibliography of memoirs (published from the 1970s to the present) by workers and politicians from the US, Canadian, and British rust belts; and—with co-author Jacob Bruggeman (Ph.D. Candidate, Johns Hopkins)—a book chapter in Where East Meets (Mid)West: Exploring a Regional Divide (Kent State University Press) on how metropolitan elites mobilized the Cleveland Orchestra’s cultural cachet to transmute the rusting Steel Belt’s industrial capital into postindustrial capital during the 1960s. These projects were supported by a lectureship at the University of Angers; a fellowship from the Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast at Lamar University; and numerous grants from Concordia University’s Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time SSHRC Partnership. Eric has published chapters on segregation and inequality in Jacksonian-era Cincinnati and late-twentieth century Dayton in The Making of the Midwest: Essays on the Formation of Midwestern Identity, 1787 to 1900 (Hastings College Press, 2020) and in The Dayton Anthology (Belt Publishing, December 2020). Eric’s written work has appeared in New Jersey Studies, The Metropole, the National Archives' Pieces of History, Belt Magazine, The Cleveland Review of Books, H-FedHist, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, and Tropics of Meta. WYSO and WCPN, Dayton and Cleveland’s NPR affiliates, have interviewed him about his writings on the Rust Belt. Eric earned a B.A. in History and French at Antioch College and an M.A. in History at Miami University of Ohio. Apart from writing history, Eric loves watching and making documentary films. He enjoys listening to music, eating ice cream, and exploring cemeteries on the weekends.