Annemarie Sammartino

  • Professor of History
  • Chair of History

Areas of Study

Education

  • BA, Rice University, 1996
  • MA, University Michigan Ann Arbor, 1998
  • PhD, University Michigan Ann Arbor, 2004

Biography

Annemarie Sammartino's most recent book is Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York (Cornell UP, 2022), which examines the history of New York through the lens of a large cooperative development and neighborhood on the margins of New York City.

Sammartino is also the author of The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914-1922 (Cornell UP, 2010), which addresses the political and ideological ramifications of migration during and after World War I. 

She is currently completing Stepping into the Past (Oxford UP, forthcoming), a book of pedagogical activities and games for the European History classroom. She is also working on a series of essays on the intellectual history of risk and risk management from the Enlightenment to the present day.

Sammartino teaches courses in modern European history, including a first year seminar on everyday life in 20th c. European dictatorships, lecture courses on gender in Modern Europe and the history of Germany and Central Europe, as well as upper level classes in urban and migration history and intellectual history.

Fall 2023

European Socialisms and Post-Socialisms — HIST 216
Senior Honors — HIST 501

Spring 2024

Senior Honors — HIST 502

Notes

Annemarie Sammartino Publishes Article in Washington Post

August 30, 2022

Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino published a piece on Co-op City, a cooperative in the Bronx, and its lessons for affordable housing policy makers and advocates in the Made by History section of the Washington Post. The Post article draws upon her recent book, Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York (Cornell UP, 2022).

Annemarie Sammartino's Book Featured on Podcast

July 19, 2022

Annemarie Sammartino's new book Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York (Cornell University Press, 2022) on the Bronx housing development and neighborhood Co-op City was featured on the "Bowery Boys Bookshelf." The Bowery Boys is a popular podcast about the history of New York City.

Annemarie Sammartino Publishes Book on Affordable Housing Development Co-op City

May 20, 2022

Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino published Freedomland, Co-op City and the Story of New York with Cornell University Press. The book uses the affordable housing development Co-op City, located in the Northeast Bronx, as a lens towards writing a new history of New York City that tells the story of race, ethnicity, class, urban crisis, and neoliberalism— but also of community, resistance, and utopia. 

Annemarie Sammartino gives lecture for advanced placement exam series

May 11, 2021

Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino gave a lecture on "Consumer Culture in Cold War Europe" for the Advanced Placement European History's series of college faculty master classes designed to help students prepare for the AP exams this spring.

Annemarie Sammartino interviewed

October 2, 2020

Professor and Chair of History Annemarie Sammartino was interviewed as part of the documentary “Beethoven's Scowl” on the CBC's Ideas program, which investigated the way that Beethoven has functioned as a symbol over the past two centuries. 

Annemarie Sammartino Publishes

April 11, 2016

Associate Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino has published “Mass Housing, Late Modernism, and the Forging of Community in New York City and East Berlin, 1965-1989" in the American Historical Review (Volume 121, Issue 2, Pgs. 492-521).

Co-op City in New York City and Marzahn in East Berlin were constructed in the late 1960s and late 1970s, respectively. This article explores both the intentions of their planners and the experiences of their residents in these two very different societies. It challenges the standard narrative of urban modernism, which sees its demise with the growth of new urbanist critiques of the 1960s.

Instead, it posits that urban modernism proved flexible enough to respond to this challenge with developments like Co-op City and Marzahn, which were simultaneously more ambitious, more defensive, and more thoughtful about the nature and meaning of urban community than their modernist predecessors in the immediate postwar period. Finally, Sammartino argues that late modernist ideas about community, in particular a kind of urban community that offered a contrast to American-style consumerism, provide a connective thread across the Iron Curtain in the later Cold War.