Angus Burgin

Angus Burgin

Associate Professor

Contact Information

Research Interests: 20th-century United States, political history, intellectual history, and history of capitalism

Education: PhD, Harvard University

History > People > Angus Burgin

My interests range widely across American and transnational intellectual history, the history of technology, and the history of moral and political economy since the 1930s.

I am currently finishing a book on the intellectual history of the internet. Other recent writings on the political economy of technology are available in The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton, 2022), Beyond the New Deal Order (Penn, 2019), and American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (Cornell, 2018). My previous book, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, explored the transformation of market advocacy over the middle decades of the twentieth century. It received the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Joseph Spengler Prize from the History of Economics Society.

I am an executive editor of the series Intellectual History of the Modern Age with the University of Pennsylvania Press, and am on the editorial board at Modern Intellectual History, where I served as co-editor through 2022.

Along with several colleagues I helped to found the Center for Economy and Society here at Johns Hopkins and am founding director of the new undergraduate major in Moral and Political Economy. (This was an outgrowth of a working group that I led for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford on how to develop new cross-disciplinary teaching platforms for a new moral political economy.) Sample undergraduate and graduate syllabi are available in full via the “Teaching” tab on this site. I am especially proud of the accomplishments of my graduate and undergraduate students, who have won both the Butler Prize for the best first-year graduate paper and the Kouguell Prize for the best undergraduate thesis in the department. In 2019 I received the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award. 

Previous Courses: 

 

  • “Politics and Economics: The Age of Entrepreneurship.” The Cultural History of Ideas, 1920–present, ed. Stefanos Geroulanos (Bloomsbury, 2022). 
  • “The Crisis of Truth in the Age of Trump.” The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment, ed. Julian Zelizer (Princeton University Press, 2022). 
  • “Market Politics in an Age of Automation.” Beyond the New Deal Order, ed. Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Alice O’Connor (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
  • “The Reinvention of Entrepreneurship.”  American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times, ed. Ray Haberski and Andrew Hartman (Cornell University Press, 2018), 163–180.
  • “New Directions, Then and Now.” The Worlds of American Intellectual History, ed. Joel Isaac, James Kloppenberg, Michael O’Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (Oxford University Press, 2017).
  • “Laissez-Faire.” Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbons (New York:  John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 2039–2043.
  • “Interchange:  History of Capitalism.”  Invited participant (with Sven Beckert, Peter Hudson, Louis Hyman, Naomi Lamoreaux, Scott Marler, Steven Mihm, Julia Ott, Philip Scranton, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer).  Journal of American History 101, no. 2 (2014), 503–536.
  • “Age of Certainty: Galbraith, Friedman, and the Public Life of Economic Ideas.” History of Political Economy, special volume on 'The Economist as Public Intellectual,' ed. Tiago Mata and Steven G. Medema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 191–219.
  • “The Political Ambiguities of Neoclassical Economics.”  Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, ed. Biddle and Emmett, v. 31a (Bingley, U.K.: Emerald, 2013), 217–224.
  • “The Radical Conservatism of Frank H. Knight.”Modern Intellectual History, vol. 6, no. 3 (November 2009), pp. 513–538.