Manuel B. Aalbers, a human geographer, sociologist and urban planner, is assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Starting February 2013 he is associate professor of Human Geography at the University of Leuven (Belgium). From January 2007 till August 2008 he was a post-doc researcher at Columbia University, New York. Previously, he was a guest researcher at New York University, City University New York, the University of Milan-Bicocca and at the University of Urbino (Italy). His main research interest is in the intersection of housing and finance. He has published on redlining, social and financial exclusion, urban policy, gentrification, the privatization of social housing, financialization, and the Anglophone hegemony in academic research and writing. He is the author of a book titled Place, Exclusion and Mortgage Markets (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and the editor of Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage Markets (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He is the associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (2010), the guest editor of special issues of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2009; 2013) on respectively mortgage markets and neoliberalism, and City (2012) on red-light districts, and associate editor of geography journal TESG.