Event details

Registration required.

This in-person talk is open to the public. Vaccination is required for in-person attendance. Princeton University requires everyone to wear face coverings while indoors. Pre-registration is required and please plan to arrive 10 minutes early to check-in with the QR code. Enter through the main doors of Robertson Hall.

Jonathan Levy is a historian of economic life and of the United States, with interests in the relationships among business history, political economy, legal history, and the history of ideas and culture. In addition to being a member of the Department of History and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought he is the current Faculty Director of the Law, Letters, and Society program.

Jonathan's recently completed book is Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House, 2021), which is a history of American economic life from British colonial settlement through the Great Recession. The book is also a single-volume history of the United States.

Much of his recent research has sought to place investment at the center of economic history and theory, and, relatedly, to contribute towards the creation of a “Keynesian” paradigm in economic history.

Professor Levy is currently working on three projects. The first is a book, The Real Economy, which collects a number of published and unpublished essays which he has written over the past years on economic theory and history, with a focus on capital, corporations, and profit. Another book, The Fetish of Liquidity, is a revised version of a series of lectures that he gave at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 2017 on global economic history since the Great Depression. The final project is a climate history of the city of Houston in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Jonathan wrote a series of essays on this topic in 2019 for the Visualizing Climate and Loss Project at Harvard’s Center for History and Economics.

His first book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard, 2012), won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and Avery O. Craven Award and the American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.

This event is co-sponsored with the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance, the Griswold Center of Economic Policy Studies and the Economic History Workshop.