My research and teaching focuses on topics related to intellectual history, transnational history, and the history of political economy since the 1930s.
My book, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression, 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. I am currently writing a book on the intellectual history of the internet, for which I will be on leave during the 2021–2022 academic year. Other recent writings on the political economy of technology are available in American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (ed. Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman) and Beyond the New Deal Order (ed. Gary Gerstle, Alice O’Connor, and Nelson Lichtenstein).
I am co-editor of the journal Modern Intellectual History, serve as an executive editor of the series Intellectual History of the Modern Age with the University of Pennsylvania Press, and am in the early stages of a project proposal to co-edit a multivolume Cambridge History of American Thought. A recent essay, "New Directions, Then and Now," explores the current state of the field of American intellectual history.
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 in recent years 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. I am also helping to lead a working group for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford that seeks to develop new cross-disciplinary teaching platforms related to moral and political economy.