Nathalie Barton

Biography

Nathalie Barton is a historian of the United States in the twentieth century, with a focus on racial inequality in American cities. Her research explores how Americans’ conceptions of race, property, and home have developed alongside each other.

She is currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled The Terms of the Lease: Renting and the Making of Racial Inequality in the Modern American City. The project offers a social history of renting’s transformation over the course of the twentieth century from a dominant structure of American life to a racialized one associated with Black urbanites especially. Through close examination of the fractious dynamics between landlords and tenants in Chicago specifically, The Terms of the Lease reveals the contested role of landlords in both making the urban housing market and in the social construction of race.

Her work has appeared in the Journal of Urban History and is forthcoming in Modern American History. In addition to her scholarship and teaching, she has worked in archives and on a range of public history projects. She served as a researcher for the American Historical Association and the NPR history podcast Throughline.

Before joining Notre Dame, she was a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University. She received her PhD in History from the University of Chicago and her BA in American Studies and History from Columbia University.