Sean is an historian of North America, specializing in urban political economy and the social history of the working class. His Ph.D. thesis from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada is a social history of Canada’s first and largest public housing project, Toronto’s Regent Park. He's published various articles on Regent Park in academic periodicals in Canada, the United States and Britain. In 2007, Editora Contexto in São Paulo published a text book that he co-wrote with Leandro Karnal, Luiz Estevam Fernandes and Marcus Vinícius de Morais called Uma História dos Estados Unidos: do mito ao império. In February 2007, the popular Brasilian history magazine, História Viva, published three of his articles about the White Dominions, the Irish question and the abolition of slavery in a special issue about the British Empire. He is now conducting a comparative research project looking at slums, ghettos and favelas in Canada, the US and Brazil. Stay tuned for more news and publications from his new project.

At the University of São Paulo, Sean teaches classes in Latin American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of the United States and Transnational History. Please contact him if you are interested in doing graduate work in North American history and Latin American history.

Below you can download his CV, some of his articles, his Ph.D. thesis and some of his course outlines.

My CV

Selected Articles
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“Framing Regent Park: the National Film Board of Canada and the Construction of Outcast Spaces in the Inner City, 1953 and 1994,” Media, Culture and Society (UK), Vol.27, no.4 (July 2005), 523-549.

“By the People, For the People: Tenant Organizing in Toronto’s Regent Park Housing Project in the 1960s and 1970s,” Journal of Urban History, Vol.30, no.4 (May 2004), 519-548.

“‘Ripped Off’ By the System: Housing Policy, Poverty and Territorial Stigmatization in Regent Park Housing Project, 1951-1991,” Labour/Le Travail, no. 50 (Fall 2003), 45-108.

“‘It was tough on everybody’: Low-Income Families and Housing Hardship in Post-World War II Toronto,” Journal of Social History 37, no.2 2003), 457-482

My Thesis

Ph.D., October 2003, Department of History, Queen's University, Dissertation: From Place of Hope to Outcast Space: Territorial Regulation and Tenant Resistance in Regent Park Housing Project, 1945-2000, (Supervisor: Bryan D. Palmer)

1) Title Page, Acknowledgements, List of Graphs, Maps and Figures, Abstract

2) Introduction: The Housing Question and ‘Outcast’ Spaces

3) Chap. 1. The Making of Regent Park: Housing Crisis, Reform Ideology and State Intervention

4) Chap. 2. Defying the Slum Label: “Branded Spaces” and the Agency of Toronto’s Inner-City Poor, 1900-1960

5) Chap. 3. First-Wave Stigmatization: The National Film Board of Canada, Albert Rose, and the Social Construction of Regent Park North in the 1950s

6) Chap. 4. “Ripped Off By the System”: The Rise of Socio-Economic Marginalization in Regent Park, 1951-1991

7) Chap. 5. The Regulation of Housing Desire: Restricting Regent Residents, the Response of the Media, and the Remaking of a Slum, 1960-2000

8) Chap. 6. By the People, For the People: Tenant Responses to Territorial Stigmatization and the Rise and Fall of Political Organization in Regent Park, 1960s-1990s

9) Conclusion and Epilogue: Redeveloping Regent Park: From a Place of Hope to the Necessity of Renewed Struggle

10) Bibliography

Course Outlines

2007 – História da América Independente I – Universidade de São Paulo
2006 – História das Idéias – Transnacional – Universidade de São Paulo
2006 – História da América III – Universidade de Brasília
2005 – História Social e Política Geral – Universidade de Brasília
2005 – Introdução ao Estudo de História – Universidade de Brasília
2005 – Histories and Geographies of Popular Culture – Temple University
2004 – The City in History – Temple University