Interview with Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow Douwe Schipper

Douwe Schipper is a historian whose work focuses on technology, science, and the environment in post-World War II Europe and the United States. He is particularly interested in the postwar history of urban transportation infrastructure and planning. In 2025 and 2026, he is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at GHI Washington. He received his PhD in the History of Science and Technology from Johns Hopkins University in 2025. His dissertation examined citizen opposition to urban transportation planning from a transatlantic perspective, focusing on activist groups in different American and Western European cities in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Douwe also holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts & Sciences from Utrecht University’s University College Roosevelt (2013), an M.Sc. in History and Philosophy of Science from Utrecht University (2018), and an M.A. in American Studies from Leiden University (2019).

In your current research project and your academic career overall, you combine different interests and fields. Could you tell us a bit more about what shaped your academic profile and interests? 

I am a historian of technology and an urban historian, and I am also interested in environmental history. My focus lies on the United States and Western Europe in the 20^th century. I am originally from the Netherlands, and before I came to the United States in 2019 for my PhD, I received two master’s degrees from Dutch Universities. I have a degree in American Studies from Leiden University and a degree in History of Science from Utrecht University. 

The focus of my work is the history of passenger transportation in cities, mostly in the postwar decades in Western Europe and the United States. I am a transatlantic historian, so I am especially interested in the historical roots of similarities and differences between the ways people move around cities in the United States and Western Europe. Transportation is an interesting topic to focus on because almost all of us deal with it in some way every day. I find that it can be a very useful lens to study other, broader phenomena such as cultural issues, political issues, or environmental issues. 

What first drew you to the field of transportation and urban planning? 

Unlike most academics who start their PhD with a very specific idea in mind, I went into it somewhat open minded, but I knew that I wanted to combine my two interests in the History of Science and American Studies in some way. The PhD program at Johns Hopkins that I enrolled in is called “History of Science and Technology,” and I ended up becoming more of a historian of technology. The immediate reason I started working on transportation was simply the experience of living in Baltimore, where Johns Hopkins University is located, and the experience of living in the United States for the first time, where transportation is very different than in Europe. Like many Europeans of my generation, I did not even have a driver's license when I moved here. In the Netherlands I always relied on public transit and biking, so I had to navigate a completely different transportation landscape in a city like Baltimore. There, inequalities in terms of who has a car and can get around and who does not are extremely visible, and racial differences are especially obvious. If you take a bus in Baltimore, there is a very good chance that all the other passengers on the bus will be African American. Inspired by those experiences, I then began to focus on the history of highways and public transit in Baltimore, and that eventually developed into a dissertation project. In my dissertation I took a transatlantic approach, comparing these issues across European and American cities. 

You've lived in the U.S. since 2019. Do you have a driver's license now? 

I do, I got my license a few years ago. My partner and I moved to the suburbs just north of Baltimore and it was impossible to get anywhere without a car. 

What kinds of sources do you use for your research and what are some of the biggest challenges in researching your topic? 

My dissertation was focused on activism, on people protesting various kinds of infrastructure projects. I took a social history approach and relied on a lot of interviews, oral history sources, newspaper articles, and archival collections of activist groups that have been preserved. For example, at the DC Public Library there is a very good collection on a group called “The Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis,” which was a group fighting highways in the 1960s here in Washington, DC. In my current project I am more interested in the government perspective as a supplement to my earlier research. I am focusing on the planning of mass transit systems in the 1970s, so far only in the United States. My sources are mainly the archival records of planning agencies. Transportation planning was and continues to be undertaken by regional governmental organizations like metropolitan planning organizations, so I focus on those archives. In terms of challenges, I would say the main one is that archives are often incomplete, so you have to find ways to work around that and fill in the gaps. And you also have to be transparent about it. 

Tell me a bit more about your current research project, Mass Transit, Regional Governance, and the Politics of Knowledge in 1960s-1970s American Transportation Planning. What questions are you hoping to answer?

This project grew out of one of my dissertation chapters, which was about the citizens protesting the planned subway in St. Louis, Missouri, in the early 1970s. During my research for this chapter, I came across sources documenting the perspective of the planning agencies for the first time. I became very interested in that period in the history of mass transit because the 1960s and 70s were a time that some scholars would describe as a kind of renaissance for mass transit planning in the United States. Numerous transit systems were conceived during this period, and some of them were actually built, like the Washington Metro here in DC. Although planning for it began even earlier, it is a product of that renewed interest in mass transit. Other examples would be MARTA in Atlanta or BART in San Francisco. The St. Louis example illustrates that there were detailed plans for transit systems in many cities, but most of them were never built in the end. I think those are interesting cases to study and to ask, why did those never get built? These new systems were planned by regional governments, which was a new development because historically, transit in the United States was mostly a private endeavor. Buses and street cars especially were mostly run by private companies, but in the 1950s and 1960s, most of those private companies went out of business for several reasons, but primarily because automobiles had become increasingly affordable. In 1964, the Urban Mass Transportation Act was passed in Congress, which allocated federal financial assistance to urban, publicly owned mass transit systems. In the following years, most transit systems in the United States fell into public ownership. 

You're from the Netherlands, where you received your first two master's degrees before you moved to the U.S. to pursue your PhD. How has your experience of these two different academic cultures shaped your research and your work? 

I would guess that Dutch academia is perhaps a little bit more Americanized in some ways than German academia, for example. Therefore, attending university in the United States was not a huge culture shock academically speaking. But there are some differences. PhD programs in the United States generally take longer because they incorporate a few years of course work and academic training before you start working on your dissertation, which I found useful because pursuing a PhD is also about becoming more professional and getting to know the culture of the profession. You also have more freedom in the United States to pursue your own topics generally. Personally, I had a very good experience with an extremely nice and very hands-on advisor who helped me a lot. 

What kind of archival research are you hoping to accomplish during your fellowship at the GHI? 

I was in Los Angeles about a month ago to look at the records of the Southern California Rapid Transit District, a regional government entity that was planning a very ambitious subway system for Los Angeles during the time period I’m researching. It was never built as planned, but it was a first step towards the subway system that was eventually opened in LA in the 1980s. I am working with those records now. I am also using the St. Louis archival materials that I had previously collected to incorporate that as another case study, and I plan to go to Chicago sometime early next year to look at another rapid transit study from Chicago. I will then have three case studies that are somewhat representative of the United States as a whole. I am still debating whether I should use Chicago or focus on a Southern city, perhaps Miami and its Metrorail system, instead. 

You have lived in Baltimore for a while, so DC was probably somewhat familiar to you even before you started your fellowship at GHI. What is your impression of Washington, DC as a place for research and scholarly exchange, but also as a place to live? 

Since I lived in Baltimore for a long time and DC is about one hour away and has a lot to offer, I would come down here about once a month on average, so I already was quite familiar with DC. Plus, I have a chapter on the DC transit system in my dissertation. The city has so much to offer: it is very culturally diverse, there are great museums and restaurants, and it has a very rich history. I think it's an interesting time to be in DC with all the political things that are going on, and I think if you observe events with a historical mindset, you will see a lot of examples of resilience existing here in DC, and that's inspiring. I also like that DC is a very walkable city compared to Baltimore. 

You were a predoctoral fellow at the Anacostia Community Museum, which is part of the Smithsonian, for six months. What kind of research were you able to conduct at the Anacostia Museum? 

I was working on my chapter about Washington, DC at the time. The museum has some relevant collections about the anti-highway protests in the 1960s, and they also helped me find useful sources in the collections of the DC Public Library. The curator I worked with knew some of the activists involved in the protests, so I got a chance to interview some of them. 

Finally, what do you like to do when you are not working or doing research? 

I am a bit of an amateur painter, so sometimes I spend an hour or two after work with a canvas and a paintbrush. I also like cooking, and I play the guitar.