Bernadette Hanlon, PhD, is Professor and Acting Head of the City and Regional Planning section in the Knowlton School at the Ohio State University. In July 2021, she became the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Urban Affairs. A first-generation college student, Dr Hanlon holds a Bachelor of Arts in Politics and Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland, a Masters in Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, a Master’s in Public Policy and a PhD in Public Policy from the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Prior to coming to the Ohio State University, she was a Research Associate at the Center for Urban Environment Research and Education, a research center at UMBC.

Dr. Hanlon’s research focuses on housing and neighborhood planning. Much of her work is centered on neighborhood changes occurring in the suburbs and in the cities of the United States. Specifically, she has written about such topics as a rise in suburban poverty and inequality, the continuous process of extended urbanization in the form of suburban sprawl, and urban and suburban gentrification and transformation under varied planning and policy regimes and housing markets.

Dr. Hanlon is the author of three books, Once the American Dream: Inner-ring Suburbs in the Metropolitan United States, Cities and Suburbs: New Metropolitan Realities in the US (with John Rennie Short and Thomas J. Vicino) and a second edition of Global Migration: The Basics (with Thomas J. Vicino), and co-editor (with Thomas J. Vicino) of The Routledge Companion to the Suburbs. She is also author of numerous book chapters. In addition, Dr. Hanlon has published in some of the leading journals in urban studies, including, for instance, the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA), the Journal of Urban Affairs (JUA), Urban Studies, Landscape and Urban Planning, Environment and Planning A, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR).

Dr. Hanlon teaches in the areas of planning for housing, planning theory, and studios related to community development and neighborhood planning.