Matthew Kaliner

Born and raised in Bethesda, Maryland, a leafy suburb of the District of Columbia, Matt Kaliner has been fascinated by urban culture since he was old enough to pedal his bicycle into - and all over - Washington.  Transplanted to the Boston area for college (Brandeis University class of 2000), Matt has slowly warmed up to Boston as an equally interesting place to live, work, and study.  Although he still feels most at home exploring the city on bike or foot, he has found in sociology and spatial analysis a far more systematic set of tools for understanding urban culture and organization.  His dissertation draws on a series of life-long interests, from the fear of crime and real estate markets to the spatial dynamics of artistic communities, to explore broad questions of culture and neighborhood change in the contemporary American city.

Although an urbanist to the core, his most recent paper, published with Jason Kaufman in Theory and Society in 2011, explores the cultural and political divergence of Vermont and New Hampshire.  Earlier publications address the the political philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (with Steven Teles), the uses of social science data archives (with Jacqueline James), and patterns of political protest strategies (with Bayliss Camp).  His undergraduate senior thesis engaged the sociology of intellectuals in the work of Karl Mannheim and Pierre Bourdieu, speaking to his love of abstract theory as well as grounded research.