Dr. Timothy J. Lombardo joined the USA History Department in August 2015 and teaches
courses in modern US history, American urban history, and recent US history.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he spent his formative years in his
hometown and remains a Philadelphian at heart. He earned both his Bachelors and Masters
Degrees at Temple University before leaving the City of Brotherly Love for small-town
Indiana to pursue a Ph.D. in American history at Purdue University. After finishing
his doctorate, Dr. Lombardo spent several years as a quasi-nomadic academic in the
Midwest, where lived for short spells in Indianapolis and Grand Rapids, Michigan and
taught history at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and Grand Valley
State University.
Dr. Lombardo鈥檚 hometown mind as he followed his academic career from one new strange
place to another. In 2018, he published Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo鈥檚 Philadelphia
and Populist Politics as part of their Politics and Culture in Modern America book
series. Combining his interests in modern American urban, social, and political history,
his first book focuses on the white ethnic and working-class supporters of Frank Rizzo鈥擯hiladelphia鈥檚
controversial police commissioner turned mayor in the 1960s and 1970s鈥攁nd their engagement
with the interwoven politics of law enforcement, school desegregation, affirmative
action, and open housing. His work on modern American urban and political history
has also appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Social History,
the Journal of American History, as well as The Washington Post.
Dr. Lombardo is continuing his work on the confluence of urban and political history
in a new book project on the effect of the craft beer industry on recent urban redevelopment.
Tentatively titled 鈥淏eer Cities: How Craft Brewing Remade Urban America,鈥� Dr. Lombardo
won a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support this
research into the process of urban renewal and gentrification through private, small-business
revitalization.
