Biography

I am an economic and intellectual historian of 20th-century capitalism and its alternatives. I completed my Ph.D. at Harvard University in May 2012.
My dissertation, A Fordist International. Illiberal Modernism and the Politics of Production in the Interwar Years: USA, Germany, Soviet Union, investigates the international proliferation of Fordism in politically illiberal settings during the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on American, German, and Soviet primary sources, it provides the first archive-based study of this process.
Seen from a broad transnational vantage point, Fordism turns out to be a production regime not specific to capitalism. Rather, the implementation of Ford’s ideas and practices was a key component of illiberal modernization drives – that is, projects of state-led economic growth, which explicitly fashioned themselves as alternatives to Western liberal capitalism.
I will use the Max Weber Fellowship to pursue my research project, ‘Towards a Global History of Fordism, 1919-1945.’ It essentially constitutes a reworking of my dissertation into a book manuscript, adopting a more consciously global perspective and taking the story through the years of World War II.
I remain broadly interested in the history of economic planning, economic management, and in the 1930s as a pivotal decade of change.
Fields of expertise: Political economy of the 20th century; modern German history; Soviet history; intellectual history of capitalism.