Angus Burgin

Angus Burgin

Associate Professor

PhD, Harvard University

burgin@jhu.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Gilman 304
Monday, 12:00-2:00 p.m.; https://calendly.com/burgin/office-hours
410-516-7575

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.

“Politics and Economics:  The Age of Entrepreneurship.”  Forthcoming in Bloomsbury Cultural History of Ideas, 1920–present, ed. Stefanos Geroulanos.  

“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, forthcoming 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.

Interview with Marketplace Tech, NPR, November 2016.

“Contra Keynes,” Wall Street Journal, November, 8, 2015.

“Dangling Man,” Dissent, Spring 2015.

Keynote presentation on “Hayek, Friedman, and the Return of Laissez-Faire” at the Hoover Institution, June 2014. 

Discussion of The Great Persuasion with Harvard University Press. 

Discussion of The Great Persuasion on EconTalk. 

Discussion of minimum wage legislation on WYPR.

Post for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History on “The Futures of American Intellectual History.”

Discussion of The Great Persuasion with Chris Gondek of the “Invisible Hand” podcast, available on iTunes.

Discussion of The Great Persuasion with John Miller of National Review, available at the “Between the Covers” podcast website or on iTunes.

Interview with Foundations, vol. 7, no. 1 (Fall 2013). 

“Hayek Lecture” at Duke University, on the Mont Pelerin Society and the postwar transformation of ideas about free markets: available at YouTube.

Keynote address on The Great Persuasion at Muhlenberg College.

Presentation at a panel from the 2010 Organization of American Historians on The New Intellectual History of Conservatism.