Jonathan Levy
Profile
Jonathan Levy is a historian of American capitalism. In addition to business and economic history, he also has interests in cultural and intellectual history, and the histories of slavery and freedom. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His first book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and RIsk in America (Harvard UP, 2012) won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and Avery O. Craven Award. Levy has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Current Project
Professor Levy is currently working on two book projects. The first is a history of the American corporation, focusing upon the split between for-profit and not-for-profit corporate forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second is a synthetic history of American capitalism from English colonial settlement to the present.
Teaching Interests
Professor Levy offers a regular undergraduate lecture course at Princeton on the history of American capitalism. He also teaches an undergraduate seminar on the history of the corporation, and the graduate seminar “Capitalist Transformations.” In future years he plans to develop an undergraduate course on the history of the American workplace.
Select Publications
Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard UP, 2012).
“Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the Unied States, 1875-1905,” American Historical Review (April, 2006).
