Sven Beckertis Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, where he researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. He recently published Empire of Cotton: A Global History, the first global history of the nineteenth century’s most important commodity.... Read more about Sven Beckert
Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Christine Desanis the author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014), a book arguing that capitalism took shape when societies radically transformed the way they engineered money, adopting bank-issued currency as their public medium and appointing private investors as experts in money creation. More generally, Desan takes a “constitutional approach” to money, exposing and exploring the governance project that packages value into a medium that can be mobilized and enforced in legal transactions.... Read more about Christine Desan
Aaron Bekemeyer, The Labor of Law Enforcement: Police Work and Political Economy in the United States after World War II
Aaron studies the history of American capitalism in the 20th century. His dissertation examines the police union movement in the United States after World War II, exploring how police officers have organized to shape the labor movement, the carceral state, and American political economy since the 1960s.
A Capitalizing City: Dar es Salaam and the Emergence of an African Entrepreneurial Elite (c. 1862-2015)
Chambi is a PhD student in African Studies with a primary field in History. His research interests include: ‘Religion and the Reproduction of Educated Elites in Africa’; ‘Comparative History of Capitalism and Militarism in Eastern and Southern Africa’; ‘Regional Formation, Land Formalization and Identity Formulation in Post-Socialist Tanzania’.
Muleteers as Bandits and Mutineers: Global Capital and Social Transformation in the Ottoman Countryside
Joan Chaker is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Harvard University who works on the intersection of Ottoman history and the global history of capitalism. She holds an M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics and an M.A. in History from the American University of Beirut, where she focused on the Ottoman tobacco market. In a previous incarnation, Joan worked as a money markets trader at ABN AMRO Bank in Amsterdam. Her current research interests also include the constitutional law of money.
Ryan entered the History PhD program in 2017. He studies the social and carceral histories of subaltern African diasporic women and men in the Americas,... Read more about Ryan Fontanilla
The Politics of Confinement: Indigenous Homelands, Imperial Duress, and Incarceration in the Deep North Borderlands
Balraj's interests include 19th-century U.S. history, slavery and capitalism, class formation, women’s history, and the history of universities. She is part of the Harvard and Slavery Research Project, which seeks to uncover and raise awareness about the historical relationship between Harvard and slavery.
Pascal is an S.J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School, with research interests in labor and employment law, economic development, law and economics and the monetary aspects of development policies.
Drawing Capital: Depiction, Machine Tools and the Political Economy of Industrial Knowledge, 1824-1914
Liat's work focuses on industrial understandings of international economic space and the intersection of capitalism with design and fabrication technologies, especially in the U.S. and Germany.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Fellowships & Writing Center, Harvard University PhD, History
Invisible Giant: The Global Rise of Soy in the Twentieth Century
Rachel completed her PhD in History in 2022. She is a scholar of the history of capitalism and commodities. Her research examines the political economy and political ecology of commodity frontiers, and her dissertation is an examination of the geopolitics of the global expansion of soybean frontiers across the twentieth century.
Zach is pursuing a PhD in Sociology with a secondary-field in Computational Science and Engineering. His research interests include machine learning and...