Media Appearances

Print and News Media

  • Alexndra Lange, “Teens Need Malls. Malls Need Crowds. Why Are They Pushing Kids Away?” The Guardian, Dec. 5, 2023

  • Smithsonian Scholars Favorite Books of 2020

    • Recommended by Kevin Strait, curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture:

      Cultural historian Kyle Riismandel explores what happened when suburban homeowners raised with visions of “Leave it to Beaver” and Levittown dancing in their heads found themselves living instead in Love Canal and facing The Decline of Western Civilization. Imperiled by everything from nuclear power plants and kidnappers to Dungeons & Dragons and Marilyn Manson, suburbanites legitimately believed that nothing less than home and family were at stake, responding to these new dangers by regulating these spaces and reinforcing nostalgic visions of the “traditional” family in ways that actually increased their powerful influence. Riismandel’s work is a meaningful contribution to the ever-expanding field of urban studies, providing a deep dive into the history of the modern suburbs and their integral role in shaping the political landscape of American culture.

  • Todd Michney, “Review: Neighborhood of Fear,” Journal of American History, Volume 109, Issue 1, June 2022, pp. 203-04.

    • The evidence from popular culture that Riismandel brings to bear creates a riveting and nostalgic read for those of us who lived it: movies and television series such as The China Syndrome (1979) and America's Most Wanted (1988–2011), MTV videos, and addictive arcade games such as Pac-Man. Neighborhood of Fear does an excellent job of contrasting the relegation of environmental hazards to urban areas and the punitive policing of Black city residents with the not-in-my-backyard attitude that kept objectionable facilities out of the suburbs and reformist, parent-led approaches to regulating suburban white youth.

  • Angus McFadzean, “Historicizing Dystopia: Suburban Fantastic Media and White Millennial Childhood,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 30, 2021.

  • Pauline Voss, “Interview with Kyle Riismandel,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 18, 2021.

  • Emily Alford, “The Suburban Nightmares Haunting Lifetime Movies,” Jezebel, April 26, 2021.

  • David Helps, “Abolishing the Suburbs: On Kyle Riismandel’s Neighborhood of Fear,” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 13, 2021.

    • With Neighborhood of Fear, Riismandel helps explain how spatial privilege became irreproachable in US politics. Among suburban histories, the book stands out in its insistence on taking popular culture seriously. By examining suburban victim narratives, Riismandel reveals how some of the most privileged Americans have continually leveraged cultural power into political gain. With their way of life seemingly endangered, suburbanites advanced their political desires as “commonsense, necessary, and nonideological.”

  • Sara Holder, “How Fear Took Over the American Suburbs,” Bloomberg CityLab, January 14, 2021.

    • In his book, “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001,” Kyle Riismandel, a senior university lecturer in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark, argues that suburbanites of this era engaged in “productive victimization,” using their imagined and real fears as a means to hoard power and exert local control. It’s a phenomenon he observed growing up in the suburbs of Wanaque, New Jersey — 30 miles away from New York City, 12 miles away from Newark, “but in many ways a world away.”

Podcasts and Livestreams