People
Program Chairs
Sven Beckert
beckert@fas.harvard.eduLaird Bell Professor of History
Sven Beckert is 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...
Christine Desan
desan@law.harvard.eduLeo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School
Christine Desan is 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...
Dissertations in Progress
Aaron Bekemeyer
bekemeyer@g.harvard.eduPhD Candidate in History
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...
Chambi Chachage
PhD Candidate
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...
Joan Chaker
joanechaker@g.harvard.eduPhD Candidate in History
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...
Ryan Fontanilla
fontanilla@g.harvard.eduPhD student in History
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, particularly the Anglo-Caribbean. His current research explores how black workers in post-Emancipation...
Balraj Gill
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...
Pascal McDougall
pmcdougall@sjd.law.harvard.eduS.J.D. Candidate
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.
Samantha Payne
Assistant Professor, College of Charleston
PhD, History
The Last Atlantic Revolution: Emancipation and Reconstruction in the U.S. and Latin America Samantha's research interests include the comparative history of slavery and emancipation, race, Atlantic history, and the history of capitalism.
Charles Petersen
cpetersen@fas.harvard.eduPhD Candidate in American Studies
"Meritocracy in America, 1930-2000" Charles is a PhD candidate in American Studies with a primary field in history. His research ranges across political, intellectual, cultural, and business history, pursuing a broad study of modern political economy. His...
Summer Shafer
The Political Economy of "Natural" Disasters: The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 and the Mississippi Flood of 1927
Liat Spiro
PhD Candidate in History
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...
Rachel Steely
rachelcsteely@gmail.comPostdoctoral 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 of commodity frontiers, and her...
Zach Wehrwein
wehrwein@g.harvard.edu Zach is pursuing a PhD in Sociology with a secondary-field in Computational Science and Engineering. His research interests include machine learning and causal inference, social network analysis, economic history, and social theory. His dissertation...
Alumni
Ann Marie Wilson
Assistant Professor, Leiden University, The Hague
Trained as a historian of the nineteenth-century United States, Ann Marie Wilson has written on women’s political activism in the American West, as well as on the history of international humanitarianism. Since moving to the Netherlands in 2011, she has...
Rudi Batzell
Assistant Professor of History, Lake Forest College
Specialization Nineteenth Century United States history Political Economy Global and Comparative History State Formation and Politics Protest and Social Movements Japanese and British Economic and Social History Education PhD Harvard University MPhil...
Aaron Bekemeyer
bekemeyer@g.harvard.eduPhD Candidate in History
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...
Nikolas Bowie
Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Nikolas Bowie is an assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School. He is a historian who teaches and writes about federal and state constitutional law and local government law. He is currently researching how the federal and state constitutions have...
Marlese Von Broembsen
Senior Lecturer in the Centre on Law and Society, University of Cape Town & Visiting Researcher, Institute for Global Law and Policy
Marlese’s research interests include the political economy of work, and more particularly, distributive issues in the context of global value chains. She writes on labour law and development, the informal economy, and on global value chains.
Eli Cook
Assistant Professor of History, University of Haifa
Eli Cook is an Assistant Professor of American history at Haifa University in Israel. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2013 . An historian of American capitalism, his Harvard University Press book, The Pricing of Progress: Economic...
Holger Droessler
Lecturer in History, Smith College
Holger Droessler is a historian of 19th- and 20th-century U.S. history, with a special focus on imperialism, capitalism and the Pacific. His book manuscript, Coconut Colonialism: Samoa and the Making of the Global South, argues that the globalization of...
Iain Frame
Lecturer, University of Kent Law School
Iain's recent research has drawn on insights from American legal realism to analyse the ways that the rules of property, contract, and negotiable instruments shaped the structure of money and banking in England and Scotland during the eighteenth and...
Balraj Gill
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...
Louis Hyman
Assistant Professor, Cornell University, ILR School
Louis Hyman is a historian of work and business at the ILR School of Cornell University, where he also directs the Institute for Workplace Studies in New York City. He has published two books on the history of personal debt (Debtor Nation and Borrow) and...
Benjamin Levin
Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Boulder
Benjamin Levin studies criminal law and its collateral consequences. His current research examines the criminal justice reform movement and its relationship to other movements for social and economic change. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming...
Stefan Link
Assistant Professor, Dartmouth College
Professor Link specializes in economic history, business history, and the intellectual history of capitalism. He is currently finishing a book on the global spread of Fordism in the interwar years, which is under contract with Princeton University Press...
Noam Maggor
Postdoctoral Associate, Cornell University
Noam Maggor is a historian of the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the emergence of industrial capitalism. His recently-published book Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America's...
Shaun Nichols
Assistant Professor of History, Boise State University
Shaun S. Nichols is an Assistant Professor of History at Boise State University, where his research and teaching center on the history of capitalism, labor, and immigration in the United States and the world. His current book project, Crisis Capital...
Vanessa Ogle
Associate Professor, UC Berkeley
I am a historian of Europe from the 18th century to the present. While my particular interests lie in Western Europe (Britain, France, Germany, mostly), I conceive of Europe broadly and seek to place European history in the context of its interactions...
Samantha Payne
Assistant Professor, College of Charleston
PhD, History
The Last Atlantic Revolution: Emancipation and Reconstruction in the U.S. and Latin America Samantha's research interests include the comparative history of slavery and emancipation, race, Atlantic history, and the history of capitalism.
Nadav Orian Peer
Visiting Assistant Professor, Tulane University
K. Sabeel Rahman
Associate Professor, Brooklyn Law School
Rahman’s research focuses on the themes of democracy, economic inequality, exclusion, and power. His first book, Democracy Against Domination (Oxford University Press, 2017) examines how democratic ideals fueled reform movements in the Progressive Era...
William Rankin
Associate Professor of the History of Science, Yale University
Bill Rankin’s research focuses on the relationship between science and space, from the territorial scale of states and globalization down to the scale of individual buildings. He is particularly interested in mapping, the environmental sciences and...
Lukas Rieppel
Assistant Professor of History, Brown University
Lukas Rieppel works at the intersection of the history of science and the history of capitalism, focusing especially on the life sciences in 19th and 20th century America. He is especially interested in evolution and development, as well as geology and...
Caitlin Rosenthal
Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley
I am a historian of 18th and 19th century U.S. history. My research focuses on the development of management practices, especially those based on data analysis. Methodolotically, I seek to blend qualitative and quantitative methods and to combine insights...
Duane Rudolph
Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Peking University School of Transnational Law
Liat Spiro
PhD Candidate in History
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...
Rachel Steely
rachelcsteely@gmail.comPostdoctoral 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 of commodity frontiers, and her...
Benjamin Waterhouse
Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Benjamin Waterhouse studies American politics, political culture, and capitalism in the twentieth century. He is interested in contests between economic groups, including business, labor, and the political class, and how the relationships among them...
