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 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. For reviews, see Dissent, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Nation. I am currently writing a book on the language of technological revolution since the Second World War, including discussions of automation, entrepreneurship, postindustrialism, postmodernism, globalization, cyberspace, and neoliberalism. Selections from that project 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.
I work with graduate students and teach undergraduate courses on a broad range of topics related to intellectual history, transnational history, and the history of capitalism; recent 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 the Butler Prize for the best first-year graduate paper, the Kouguell Prize for the best undergraduate thesis in the department, and best dissertation awards from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Business History Conference. 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.