Maddie is the 2022-2024 Annual Fellow in the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and a PhD candidate in American & New England Studies at Boston University. Though she has thoroughly enjoyed her time researching in every archive in the city, she is excited to use her urban historian skillset in an actual urban environment. She thinks perhaps she can use the lessons of Boston’s past to improve its future—and definitely make it more delightful.

Maddie is fresh off her year as the 2021-2022 Public Research Fellow in History and Geography at the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center @ the Boston Public Library, where she contributed to their exhibit “More or Less in Common: Environment and Justice in the Human Landscape,” and gave public talks on historic preservation, place names, and real and imaginary boundaries in Roxbury. But she spent most of her year studying fire insurance atlases via their online Boston historic map tool, Atlascope.

When Maddie is not at City Hall, you can find her in her Comm. Ave. apartment writing her dissertation on Black Bostonians’ historic preservation efforts from the comfort of a beanbag chair. Either that or feeding the Park Street pigeons.