Biography

Gergely Baics will earn his Ph.D. in History at Northwestern University (Chicago) in 2009.  He holds an M.A. in History from Central European University (Budapest) and a B.A. from ELTE University (Budapest).  In 2008-2009, he is a research associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia).
Baics’s primary research and teaching area is modern urban history with a focus on the Americas and Europe.  His specializations include nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic population and migration histories, and American social history.  He also has strong interests in economic history, social science methodologies, and urban studies.
At Northwestern, he worked as a teaching assistant for urban history, American history and world systems courses, and as an instructor of advanced level seminars on the history of modern urban space, and the impact of public health efforts on nineteenth-century urbanism.
His dissertation “Feeding Gotham: A Social History of Urban Provisioning, 1780-1860” examines how structural changes in New York’s provisioning system sustained the city’s rise as an Atlantic metropolis, affected the standards of living of its residents, altered the social geography of household consumption, and transformed everyday social interactions in public space.
The project has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Evan Frankel Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and The Graduate School of Northwestern University.  At EUI, Baics will revise his dissertation for publication, expanding its analysis towards a transnational history of urban provisioning.