Biography
I am a sociologist who interrogates the historically changing politics of money creation in British colonial America and the United States. In a series of articles and a book (Moral Economies of Money, Stanford University Press), I show how that for centuries, large groups understood money creation as a political practice and attempted to redesign the institutions that create money. I also discuss how and why public monetary controversies receded and re-emerged periodically, and show how debate or silence about money creation shaped possibilities for collective life. This historical and theoretical project is grounded in a commitment to democratizing socio-economic life today.
I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on money and debt, human rights, social justice and migration. While factual information is important, I understand teaching above all as a process of familiarizing students with concepts and ways of thinking that may be new to them. I want learners to make their initial commitments more explicit and reconsider everyday lives in their institutional context through various theoretical lenses. I want them to be able to make informed choices about sociological frameworks, adopt or reject these lenses, and use them to analyze situations outside of the classroom.
Education
- PhD, Binghamton University
- MA, University of Vienna, Austria
- DEUG, Marc Bloch University, France