Kenneth Alyass is a Ph.D. Candidate in history at Harvard University where he studies modern U.S. history. His dissertation is provisionally titled "From the Motor City to the Murder City: Postindustrial Detroit in the Age of Mass Incarceration." It examines the intertwined histories of deindustrialization and the rise of the carceral state during the twenty-year mayoral tenure of the city's first Black mayor, Coleman A. Young. Beyond his dissertation, Kenneth is interested in the history of drugs and illicit economies, suburban politics and culture, and is in the early stages of a project on the roots of American fascism in the Great Depression. He is also an Assistant Editor at the Urban History Asscoation's blog, The Metropole, and a Graduate Associate at The Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. His writing can be found in The Metropole, the Cleveland Review of Books, Gotham, The Journal of American Ethnic History, and The Michigan Historical Review. Reach him at kalyass@g.harvard.edu and on Twitter @kenalyass.

Project: Ghetto Grocers: Race, Commerce, and Ethnicity in Detroit, 1965-2015