Teal Arcadi, a graduate student with the Department of History, was awarded a Dwight D. Eisenhower/Clifford Roberts Graduate Fellowship for the 2020-21 academic year. The fellowship is intended to support scholars engaged in the study of public policy.
Teal Arcadi is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Princeton University; his dissertation is titled Remapping America: The Interstate Highway System and Infrastructural Governance in the Postwar United States. Arcadi’s research examines how the construction of the interstate highway system demonstrated and reinforced the rising power of the mid-twentieth-century administrative state. More than a transportation system, the interstates were a tool with which statebuilders blazed fiscal and legal paths for federal agencies, concretizing non-electoral administrative authority, and producing a physical and governmental edifice insulated from democratic pressure. And that edifice produced far-reaching inequality: fault lines of race, class, gender and sexuality, and environmental destruction followed interstate construction across the national landscape. Claimants who sought to redress social and spatial inequality wrought by the interstates discovered their carefully-designed exclusion from infrastructural planning. In the process, they illuminated the priorities of statebuilding and located the boundaries of administrative justice in modern America.