Elihu Rubin is the Henry Hart Rice Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at Yale. He is a faculty member at Yale School of Architecture and has a secondary appointment in the American Studies program in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Rubin is a certified city planner (AICP), architectural historian, and documentary filmmaker who pursues community-based engagement and planning strategies that integrate urban history, storytelling, video-making, and interactive events.

Rubin’s scholarship has focused on the built environments of American cities and the dynamics of urban change. His book Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape (Yale University Press, 2012) received Best Book awards from the Urban History Association and the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH). Rubin’s research on the history and theory of urban planning, historic preservation, and critical heritage are topics in his current book project, “Ghost Town: The Urban History of an American Icon.” In Fall 2024, Rubin was the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship.

Rubin teaches both graduate and undergraduate students, including the required Core IV Urban Design studio for M.Arch I students in the Yale School of Architecture and a large lecture class on American Architecture and Urbanism for Yale College. He has engaged in teaching collaborations like Design Brigade in which students address a design problem for a local organization. Rubin has served as mentor to graduate and undergraduate students in a range of academic programs, and he has helped lead the Urban Studies major as its Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Rubin has made community-based teaching a hallmark of his efforts as an educator. Students are introduced to people and places in New Haven and create research-based assignments in collaboration with local organizations that are shared-back in public settings like the New Haven Free Public Library. Rubin’s research initiative, the Yale Urban Media Project amplifies these efforts at community-engaged research and public scholarship. They have included the New Haven Building Archive, Interactive Crown Street, New Haven Industrial Heritage Trails, the publication of the New Haven Building Newsprint, and a sustained engagement with local efforts to resuscitate the Goffe Street Armory.

As Faculty Director of Advocacy and Planning at the Yale Urban Design Workshop, Rubin has been actively engaged with neighborhood planning efforts with the Greater Dwight Development Corporation and the Dwight Central Management Team. Planning expertise includes transportation and urban mobility, social and historical research methods, industrial heritage and brownfield conversions. He has served on the boards of the Junta for Progressive Action, the New Haven Preservation Trust, and the Lost in New Haven Museum.

Rubin earned a Masters of City Planning and a PhD in the History of Architecture and Urbanism from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale.  He is co-founder of the documentary film group American Beat which has produced a trilogy of films about New Haven, amongst other projects.