Vyta Pivo is an interdisciplinary historian of the built environment, racial capitalism, and the US in global context. She is working on her first book, A World Cast in Concrete: How the US Built Its Empire, under contract with the University of Chicago Press. She has published research on concrete, construction labor, and design in academic and public-facing outlets, including The Conversation, PLATFORM, and Perspectives on History.
Her scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, American Council of Learned Societies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and others. She currently teaches architectural design and history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
While at MacDowell, Pivo drafted a chapter on the deep time of concrete for her forthcoming monograph, A World Cast in Concrete: How the US Built Its Empire.
