Faculty

Profile

I am a historian of political economy, inequality, capitalism, labor, and urban life, specializing in the United States. My first book, Progressive Inequality (Harvard UP, 2014), examines class relations in New York and the U.S. during the Long Gilded Age. I am currently completing a history of Alfred Winslow Jones, the socialist creator of the modern hedge fund.

Before returning to The New School and Lang as Part-Time Faculty, I was Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Modern U.S. History at the University of York in England, and Visiting Fellow at the J.F.K. Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. In addition to York and the New School, I have taught history at Yale, Wesleyan, and NYU. My scholarship has received awards and research funding from the Tobin Project for Democracy and Markets, the New-York Historical Society, The British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust, among others.  

My commentary and writing have appeared for VICE News, the Los Angeles Times, BBC News, Deutsche Welle radio, and Le Monde, and Dissent. I also serve as Contributing Editor for the CUNY Grad Center's Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History. 

Degrees Held

Ph.D. Yale

A.B. Harvard

F.H.E.A. U.K.

Recent Publications

“The ‘Background Conditions’ of the Hedge Fund in G.E.'s Schenectady:
Reconsidering the ‘History of Capitalism’,” Transatlantica 2 (2021), 1-23.

“A short (sales) story: The dawn of the hedge fund,” Los Angeles Times, 12 February 2021.
 “Lecture Capture: Dubious Scholarship and Market Forces,” #USSbriefs62, 22 Oct. 2018,
URL: https://medium.com/ussbriefs/lecture-capture-dubious-scholarship-and-
market-forces-6f6c8dcb960d.

“Labor and Class in the GAPE: Fruitful Opposition and the Specter of the Middle
Class,” A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Christopher M. Nichols
and Nancy C. Unger eds. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).

“Race, Space, and a Right to the City in New Haven: A Four-Century View,” Revue
Française d’Études Américaines 148, issue on “Claiming a Right to the City in the
American Metropolis,” Andrew Diamond and Laurence Gervais, eds. (April 2017), 8-30.

“From Socialism to Hedge Fund: The ‘Human Element’ and the ‘New History of
Capitalism,’” Journal of World-Systems Research 21:2 (2015), 288-312. 

Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890 to 1920 (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Research Interests

American class relations; wealth, poverty and inequality; labor movements and social justice organizing; US political economic development; history of US social policy; US foreign relations; the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era; violence; historical theory; American urban history.

Awards And Honors

Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.

Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of York Department of History.

British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award.

Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Summer Fellowship.

Bernard and Irene Schwartz Postdoctoral Fellowship, New-York Historical Society and the New School.

Stephen Vella Prize, Yale University (dissertation prize awarded to the historian “combining extraordinary scholarship with a commitment to social justice”).

Tobin Project Research Fellowship in Democracy & Markets.