M.A., M.Phil, and Ph.D., Yale University
MFA, Iowa Writers' Workshop
B.S., Northwestern University
Andrew Friedman's teaching and research interests include the international history of the United States, space and the built environment, race and racism, U.S. empire and migration, American Studies, comparative colonial history and decolonial theory, political technologies and historical materialism, and cultural history.
Friedman is the author of Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia (University of California Press), winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for 2014 and recipient of Honorable Mention for the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for 2015.
Covert Capital is a cultural and spatial history that chronicles how the CIA and other "national security" institutions that defined U.S. foreign policy in the era of global decolonization created domestic space around their own headquarters and abroad. The project argues for an alternate genealogy for U.S. migration by tracing the social, work and family relationships, formed during violent U.S. endeavors, which carried American agents abroad and migrants from Vietnam, El Salvador, Iran, the Soviet Union, Cuba and elsewhere home to the D.C. suburbs. As U.S. empire expressed itself abroad by developing roads, embassies and villages, its subjects arrived in the covert capital as real estate agents, home owners, mall builders and landscapers, constructing places, living monuments and a complex political space that nurtured, reflected and critiqued U.S. foreign policy and global operations after World War II. Ushering the study of U.S. empire into everyday life, the book explores how an imperial U.S. citizenship was lived and disavowed in everyday space, and re-narrates the history of postwar suburbanization as the spatial device that helped produce an imperial citizenry and subjectivity.
Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia (University of California Press, 2013)
"The Fabric of Spying: Double Agents and the Suburban Cold War," in Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, eds. John Archer, Paul J.P. Sandul and Katherine Solomonson (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
"The Global Postcolonial Moment and the American New Town: India, Reston, Dodoma," Journal of Urban History 38.3 (May 2012): 553-576.