Andrew Kahrl

Andrew Kahrl is a professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on the social, political, and environmental history of real estate, land use, and taxation in twentieth-century America. He teaches courses on race and real estate in post–World War II America, the civil rights movement, and American cities in the twentieth century. His first book, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (2012), received the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. Kahrl has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He has written about the issue of public beach access in the New York Times and other publications and is finishing a book on the modern struggle for public access to beaches in Connecticut, America's most privatized shoreline. His current work examines the history of discriminatory taxation against African Americans and explores the shadowy world of tax lien investing, its impact on urban minority neighborhoods, and its role in shaping real estate markets.