Research/Areas of Interest
History of capitalism, modern European history, French history, intellectual history, global history, economic history
Education
- PhD, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States, 2017
- MA, University of Chicago, Chicago, United States, 2004
- BA, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States, 2002
Biography
I am an intellectual historian of economic life, with broader research interests in modern European history, French history, and global history as well. I am particularly interested in taking a "material" approach to intellectual history, placing concrete economic, financial, and political systems in dialogue with theories, ideologies, and conceptual formations. My work has appeared in journals such as Modern Intellectual History, French History, and La Révolution Française. My current book project, A Financial Meridian: Public Debt and Capitalism in France between Empires, examines the transformation of financial capitalism in the wake of economic, political, and military collapse. It argues that the dissolution of one kind of empire in France created the conditions for the rise of another. Situated at the Paris Stock Exchange, it focuses on critical episodes in the relationship between public debt and capitalism in France: the nature of capital accumulation during the 1789 Revolution, the moral and political controversies over financial speculation and individual risk in the Napoleonic era and Bourbon Restoration, the potentially "civilizing" effects of public debt, and the relations between labor, debt, and imperial expansion between France and Haiti.