Gergely Baics

Gergely Baics joined the Barnard History Department in 2010. He holds a joint appointment with the Urban Studies Program, where he is Helman Endowed Faculty Chair. He is Faculty Co-Director of the Barnard Empirical Reasoning Center, and previously served as Director of the Barnard-Columbia Urban Studies Program (2018-22).

Baics's scholarly interests include urban history, spatial history, digital public history, 19th-century US economic and social history, trans-Atlantic population history, and social science history methods. He is the author of Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790-1860 (Princeton University Press, 2016). His articles have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, Urban History, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, and Planning Perspectives.

Baics's recent work has focused on two collaborative digital public history projects. "Envisioning Seneca Village" (2024) combines historical research with digital mapping and visualization to present an interactive 3D digital model of what Seneca Village might have looked like in 1855, about two years before its destruction to build Central Park. "Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas" (2021/24), a big data spatial history project based at Columbia's History Department and the Center for Spatial Research at GSAPP, draws on the 1850, 1880, 1910, 1940 federal censuses to map and visualize changes in immigration, residential, and occupational patterns in New York City's five boroughs. Baics is also at work on a new book project, Transitional City: Built and Social Environments in 19th-Century Manhattan’s Urban Periphery, and on several coauthored articles on a variety of topics, exploring social heterogeneity in US cities in 1880, measuring socially meaningful distance in the historical city, mapping residential mobility in late 19th-Copenhagen, and interpreting the Jesuit missions of the Guarani as an Indigenous urban system in colonial Spanish America.

Baics's research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, and the Presidential Research Award at Barnard. He is a recipient of Barnard's Gladys Brooks Teaching Award. At Barnard, he offers lectures and seminars on transnational and US urban history, New York City history, and spatial history, including “Colonial Cities of the Americas, c. 1500-1800”; “19th-Century New York City Spatial History”; “Urban Studies Junior Seminar”; “History Department Senior Thesis Seminar.”