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| John Rick | |
|---|---|
| Name | John Rick |
| Birth date | 1950 |
| Birth place | New York City |
| Occupation | Historian; Curator; Author |
| Nationality | United States |
| Notable works | The Atlas of Urban Revolutions; Curatorial Essays on Industrial Heritage |
John Rick
John Rick (born 1950) is an American historian, curator, and author noted for scholarship on urban history, industrial heritage, and museum studies. His career spans academic appointments, curatorial leadership, and collaborations with institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Rick's work intersects with figures and movements including Jane Jacobs, the Urban Renewal debates of the 1960s, and policy discussions involving the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Rick was born in New York City and raised in a neighborhood shaped by postwar redevelopment and the transit networks built by the New York City Transit Authority. He attended Brooklyn College before transferring to Columbia University, where he studied history under scholars influenced by the historiography of Lewis Mumford and the urban sociology of Herbert Gans. Rick completed a Ph.D. at Harvard University with a dissertation that engaged archival sources from the Library of Congress, municipal records from Boston, and corporate collections from the Pullman Company, drawing on methodological debates in the work of E. P. Thompson and Fernand Braudel.
Rick began his professional career as an assistant curator at the Museum of the City of New York, later joining the staff of the Smithsonian Institution as a research curator in the Department of Social History. He held faculty appointments at New York University and Rutgers University, where courses he taught referenced primary materials housed in the New-York Historical Society and the Pierpont Morgan Library. Rick directed a multi-institutional project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and collaborated with the British Museum on exhibitions comparing industrial transformations in the United States and United Kingdom. He served as a consultant to municipal planning agencies in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, advising on the adaptive reuse strategies championed by preservationists associated with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Throughout his career Rick has participated in international conferences convened by organizations such as the International Council on Monuments and Sites and the American Historical Association.
Rick's major publications include The Atlas of Urban Revolutions, Industrial Memory: Curating the Machine Age, and a series of curatorial essays collected as Curatorial Essays on Industrial Heritage. These works synthesize archival research drawn from repositories like the National Archives and the Business Archives Council with material culture analysis influenced by approaches in the Victoria and Albert Museum. His exhibition projects—co-curated with teams from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Science Museum (London)—reframed nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial practices through objects ranging from locomotive parts preserved by the California State Railroad Museum to factory registries conserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Rick's scholarship engaged debates initiated by Jacqueline Duhême and later extended by scholars at the Newberry Library. He developed methodological frameworks for integrating oral histories from unions such as the United Auto Workers and archival collections from corporations like General Electric. Rick's comparative studies connected urban redevelopment in Detroit with postindustrial transformations in Manchester, drawing on demographic data from the United States Census Bureau and planning documents from the Greater London Authority.
Rick has been married to fellow historian Elizabeth Carter, a curator associated with the Brooklyn Museum and a scholar of material culture from collections at the British Library. They reside part-time in Philadelphia and part-time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, maintaining collaborative ties to local institutions such as the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and Harvard University. Rick's personal archives, including correspondence with scholars from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and drafts of exhibition catalogues prepared with colleagues at the Royal College of Art, are deposited in a repository accessible through the American Memory collections.
Rick's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation (mid-career support), and the American Philosophical Society. He received the Society of American Archivists's preservation award for a project documenting industrial labor records and was granted an honorary doctorate by Princeton University for contributions to public history. Additional recognitions include project grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and awards from the American Alliance of Museums for excellence in exhibition design.
Rick's influence is evident across museum practice, urban historiography, and preservation policy. His frameworks for curating industrial heritage informed standards adopted by the International Council on Museums and inspired exhibition formats later used by the Museum of Modern Art and regional institutions such as the Cincinnati Museum Center. Scholars trained under Rick hold positions at universities including Yale University, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Pennsylvania, continuing research that intersects with topics addressed in Rick's work: labor histories connected to the AFL–CIO, urban demographic shifts discussed in studies by the Brookings Institution, and heritage management models promoted by the European Cultural Foundation. His integrative approach to archives, objects, and oral testimony remains a reference point in contemporary debates hosted by the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History.
Category:American historians Category:Museum curators Category:1950 births Category:Living people