Mark Krasovic

Mark Krasovic received his PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 2008. His research and teaching interests center on the cultural and political history of the modern United States and the public arts and humanities. His first book,The Newark Frontier: Community Action in the Great Society (University of Chicago Press, 2016) examines how 1960s liberalism's experimentation with governing structures - experiments guided by an ethic of community participation and sometimes control - created novel alliances among government officials, academics, and local Newarkers to confront and struggle over the perceived crisis of America’s cities. The manuscript is based on his dissertation, which was the honorable mention finalist for the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize.

His current book project explores federally funded arts projects in the 1960s - especially those funded by the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, the War on Poverty, and the Model Cities Program - that theorized the relationship between the arts and community development and put those theories into practice. This research has been supported by a Nancy Weiss Malkiel Junior Faculty Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Since coming to Rutgers-Newark in 2008 as the Geraldine R. Dodge Postdoctoral Fellow at the Clement A. Price Institute, Mark has been involved in an array of publicly engaged projects. He is currently (2021-2023) the lead PI on a Mellon Foundation-funded racial reparations project that weaves together historical research and community dialogue to organize for reparations in Newark, in New Jersey, and nationally. The project is headquartered at the University of Michigan's Center for Social Solutions and involves national and local partners, including the NJ Institute for Social Justice and the Newark Community Development Network. He is also currently conducting oral history interviews in support of the archival efforts of Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art (1983-2018). And he serves on the steering committees for the Ironbound Community Corporation archives, the Newark History Society, and the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium.

While at the Price Institute, which he served as both associate and interim director, Mark helped organize numerous public programs, fellowship opportunities, and research projects. Among them was the Kea's Ark exhibit and archive with Gallery Aferro; the Amiri Baraka Fellows Program; the Ironbound Environmental Justice History and Resource Center; and the local town hall program for the federal Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

He regularly teaches courses on modern US cultural and political history, racial justice in US history, various topics in Newark history (including 1967 Newark uprising and "Newark in Maps"). He often co-teaches "Local Citienship in a Global World," the core class for RU-N's Honors Living-Learning Community.