Annemarie (Ari) Sammartino

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.

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. 

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.