Biography & Projects

My training was originally in history – particularly economic and financial history, history of science, and global history. My Ph.D. was completed at Princeton University in 2016. The dissertation, entitled Liberalism in Numbers Only: Science, Politics and State Power in Postwar Global Fisheries Management examines the move across the world to administration of fisheries through individually tradable quotas, examining how and why states created markets for fishing quotas out of whole cloth. The dissertation takes the Soviet Union/Russian Federation, Norway, and Peru as case studies and includes extended discussions of North American postwar fisheries economics, as well.

Since the Ph.D. I have been a postdoctoral fellow first at the Max Planck Institute for Study of Society in Cologne, Germany and now at CET within the University of Bergen, meaning I have been embedded in highly interdisciplinary environments over the past three years. Thus, the work I do tends toward the social sciences, especially political economy and economic geography, with significant interest in ecological economics and economic sociology, as well. History being a broad tent, I consider myself an economic historian focusing on contemporary history or history of the present, what in German one calls Zeitgeschichte. This focus resulted in work on political economies of electricity from the 1980s to the present, particularly in Germany where I have done work on large German electrical utilities in the energy transition.

I am currently working on two larger projects – one a global history of carbon emissions (on which I also teach a class) and another on the history of financial crises in the 1990s and transformation in global finance in the first decade after the end of the Cold War.

I am also interested in computational text analysis and ways of employing Natural Language Processes (NLP) methods and machine learning algorithms for analyzing document and corpus similarities, topics, clusters and network analyses within and between documents. I have an abiding interest in how quantitative methods can be brought (back) into the historian’s toolkit in a way that complements and enhances historical research and training.