About

LaDale Winling is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech. His specialties are U.S. urban history, African American history, digital history, and public history.  

His first book, Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century, is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It examines the role of universities in urban development and was co-winner of the Kenneth T. Jackson Prize for best book from the Urban History Association.

His collaborative digital project examining the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and redlining, Mapping Inequality, was released in the Fall of 2016. He worked with scholars at the University of Richmond, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Maryland to research redlining, to digitize archival resources, and to interpret the history of redlining. Mapping Inequality won honorable mention from the American Studies Association for the Garfinkel Prize for digital humanities. The data visualization project Electing the House of Representatives, 1840-2016, launched in October 2018 with collaborators at the University of Richmond, and is the most complete set of digital election and spatial data ever created for Congress. Both of these projects were part of the American Panorama digital atlas, which won the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for digital history.

Winling is currently writing a book on the conflict over race, real estate, and civil rights in the first half of the twentieth century, titled Property Wrongs, and under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Winling leads a digital research project on racially restrictive covenants in Chicago, the Chicago Covenants Project, working with the public to identify every racially restrictive covenant in Cook County, Illinois. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the NEH, the ACLS, and the NHPRC, among others. If you are interested in HOLC redlining, please see this page and visit the Mapping Inequality site.

You may reach LaDale Winling via email at lwinling AT gmail DOT com. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. His CV is available here.