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 in the process of proposing a 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.
