He has published in the Journal of the West, a Routledge anthology, and the Encyclopedia of American Urban History. Gruen is revising a manuscript entitled “Manifest Destinations: Tourist Encounters in the Urban American West, 1870-1893” for the University of Oklahoma Press––a work that explores the push-and-pull between urban presentation and the tourist encounter in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Chicago in the late nineteenth century. He earned his Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley.