As Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University-Camden, Gillette has specialized in modern U.S. history, with a special interest in urban and regional development. Currently he serves as co-editor of the online Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. His latest book, The Paradox of Urban Revitalization: Progress and Poverty in America’s Post-industrial Age, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in March, 2022. His book, Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), received best book awards from the Urban History Association and the New Jersey Historical Commission. He was honored with the Historical Society of Washington, D. C.’s Visionary Historian Award in 2018 and the Society for American City and Regional Planning History’s Laurence Gerckens Prize for sustained teaching excellence and educational leadership in the field of planning history in 2019. Previously he taught at George Washington University and the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught for the Urban Studies Department in 2016 and 2017. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American Studies from Yale University.
Professor Gillette is immediate past director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, a research and advocacy organization for bringing new intellectual and monetary resources to cultural practice in the humanities as it relates to the Mid-Atlantic states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. His work in public history has included a role as a founder and first director of the Center for Washington Area Studies at the George Washington University and as editor of Washington History, the journal of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. He is a past president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History and a former board member of the Historical Society of Washington and the Camden County Historical Society. He is the author, among other works, of Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; University of Pennsylvania Press 2006 paperback edition), Civitas by Design: Building Better Communities, from the Garden City to the New Urbanism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), and Class Divide: Yale ’64 and the Conflicted Legacy of the Sixties (Cornell University Press, 2015).
In late October, 2025 Penn Press will print three books drawn primarily from the on-line Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Heavily illustrated and fully contextualized, select essays constitute a window into the city’s prominent role in the region, the nation, and the world. Former Temple professor and dean Carolyn Adams is my co-editor for the region book, which addresses frontally Philadelphia’s limited leadership in what scholars generally agree is the most important economic unit in modern times: the region. As we lead up to publication, I am posting a series of blogs on the encyclopedia website, linking contemporary issues of regional consequence to previous postings. I will be updating news on events related to publication as October approaches.