Teal Arcadi

Teal Arcadi

Travel Fellow

Remapping America: Power, Poverty, and the Interstate Highway System in the Postwar United States

Teal Arcadi is a PhD candidate in history at Princeton University. He studies twentieth-century America, with interests in political economy, state-building, gender and sexuality, law, and the environment. His dissertation, “Remapping America: The Interstate Highway System and Infrastructural Power in the Postwar United States,” examines the creation and consequences of the interstate highways after World War II. Via the new highways, officials inscribed social, political, and economic priorities across American space and time. His research illuminates this process of infrastructural priority-fixing, and the often inequitable geographies of state-charted movement that people then encountered in everyday life.

He grew up in upstate New York, in a town with no interstate exit, and received his undergraduate degree from Cornell. Before joining the Princeton history department, he worked as a researcher at Public Agenda, a civic engagement think tank in New York City.