My research and teaching explore problems at the intersection of ideas, politics, and markets in the United States and the Atlantic world since the late 19th century.
My recent book, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012), explores 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, was listed as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice (2013), and was named a "Book of Exceptional Merit" by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. For reviews, see Dissent, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Nation. I am currently writing an intellectual history of postindustrialism, exploring how new technological capacities in the postwar era transformed ideas about the future of work, knowledge, leisure, time, and space.
I am on the faculty editorial board of Johns Hopkins University Press, and am an executive editor of the series "Intellectual History of the Modern Age" with the University of Pennsylvania Press. I work with graduate students on a broad range of topics related to intellectual history, transnational history, and the history of capitalism.