Dr. Fox is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work examines urban design and infrastructure using interdisciplinary methods. She is interested in how human beings use the built environment to achieve their sociopolitical ends and to develop novel imaginations of urban thriving. She engages with anthropological theory, particularly questions of history and temporality, as well as policy-based research on urban administration. Her first book, The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany's Model Socialist City will be published by Cornell University Press in 2025. The multi-modal ethnography examines Eisenhüttenstadt, a city founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, an East German socialist utopia. The city lost over half its population during the 1990's, but has since been revitalized through large-scale urban restructuring that explicitly draws on the communitarian ethics of its foundational moment. In 2024, the European Parliament pledged €1.3 billion to transform Eisenhüttenstadt into the world's first carbon-neutral steel manufacturing site by 2050, a move that both reflects and enables the city's new identity as a paragon of sustainable shrinkage. Dr. Fox is also conducting research into the social effects of electricity deregulation in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and has conducted qualitative research for New York City and State. At Lehigh, she is part of the Institute for Cyber Infrastructure and Energy (ICPIE) and the Small Cities Lab.
Samantha Fox
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Columbia University, 2018
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Research Areas
Additional Interests
- Urban Studies
- Urban Policy
- Visual Anthropology
- Documentary Studies
- Environmental Anthropology
- Post-socialism
- Cultural Memory
- Germany
Research Statement
Biography
Samantha Maurer Fox is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a faculty member in Global Studies. She received her BA as a Senior Fellow from Dartmouth College (2008), her MA in Visual and Media Anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin (2010), and her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University (2018). Prior to coming to Lehigh, she worked as a lecturer in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin and as a postdoctoral fellow in the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School for Social Research.
PUBLICATIONS
Articles
Fox, Samantha Maurer. 2024. “A City of Newcomers: Migration and Solidarity in the Former East Germany.” City & Society 36 (2): 67–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12484.
Fox, Samantha Maurer. 2022. “The Socialist Bratwurst: East German Urbanism and Its Reemergence in the Present.” Journal of Urban History 48 (3): 541–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144220953141.
Fox, Samantha Maurer. 2022. “I Feel Brandenburg: Temporality, Vacancy, and Migration in Germany’s Model Socialist City.” Anthropological Quarterly 95 (2): 437–64.
Fox, Samantha Maurer. 2020. “Street Lighting and the Uneasy Coexistence of Socialist and Capitalist Urban Imaginaries.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38 (4): 646–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820909140.
Books
Forthcoming 2025, The Afterlife of Utopia: Urban Renewal in Germany’s Model Socialist City, Cornell University Press.
Policy, Reviews, and Commentary
2024, Review of Asylum and Extraction in the Republic of Nauru, Current Anthropology
2021, Review of Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam, Anthropology Quarterly.
2019, Fox, Schulz, and Turner, “Reimagine the Canals Community Engagement Report.” Albany: The Rockefeller Institute of Government.
2018, “Dark: Energy Politics in an Age of Latency,” Europe Now, Issue 14
2017, Review of Divided Subjects, Invisible Borderlands, Europe Now, Issue 4
Edited Volumes
2017, eds. Undine Frömming, Steffen Köhn, Samantha Fox, and Mike Terry, Digital Environments: Ethnographic Perspectives Across Global Online and Offline Spaces. Transkript Verlag, Edition Medienwissenschaft and Columbia University Press.
Teaching
Dr. Fox teaches a range of undergraduate classes in anthropology, many of which are cross-listed with global studies and other disciplines. Examples include:
Anth 011: Cultural Diversity and Human Nature
Anth/GS 106: Cultural Studies and Globalization
Anth 113: Culture Theory
Anth 114: How to Study Culture
Anth/ES/EVST 121: Environment and Culture
Anth/GS 126: Urban Anthropology
Anth 366: Power, Preparedness, Precarity