Calendar of Events: Spring 2010
(see below for Fall 2009)
January 25: Sven Beckert, Harvard University
Commentators: Alex Keyssar, Professor, Harvard Kennedy School
Linda Thorsen, Harvard University
February 22: Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame
"The Cowles Commission as an Anti-Keynesian Stronghold 1943-1954"
Commentators: Stephen Marglin, Professor, Harvard University
Tyler Goodspeed, Harvard University
March 1: Reading Session: Money
R. A. Radford, “The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp,” Economica Nov. 1945: 189-201.
Karl Marx, trans. B. Fowkes, Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Econom, Penguin Classics, 1990, excerptsBruce G. Carruthers and Sarah Babb, “The Color of Money and the Nature of Value: Greenbacks and Gold in Postbellum America,” American Journal of Sociology 101: 1556-1591 (May 1996).
March 29: Lauren Coyle, University of Chicago
"Refiguring the Anthropology and Sociology of Money: Beyond Performativity and Discursivity to Money as Capital""(with David Bholat)
Commentator: Anush Kapadia, Columbia University, andTor Krever, Harvard Law School
Recommended Readings:
Georg Lukacs. 1971 [1923]. "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Rodney Livingstone, trans. MIT Press. (pp. 83-222, but please focus on Part I, "The Phenomenon of Reification," pp. 83-110.)
Moishe Postone. 2004. "Critique and Historical Transformation," Historical Materialism 12(3):53-72.m." (pp. 3-42)
April 12: Roy Kreitner, Tel Aviv University
"Money in the 1890s: The Circulation of Politics, Economics and Law"
Required Reading: Milton Friedman, "Money as Mischief," excerpt.
Recommended Reading: Roy Kreitner, "Political Economy of Money"
Commentators: Duncan Kennedy, Professor, Harvard Law School
Orlando Segura, Harvard Law School
Robinson Hall, Lower Library
April 19: Mauro Pala, Nanovic Institute at the University of Notre Dame and
“Americanism strikes back: on the reception of Gramsci’s thought in the US”
Robinson Hall, Lower Library
April 26: Presentation of student research papers
Anna Bergren, Dissertation Prospectus, " Building the Military State: United States Army Architecture and Planning, 1890-1945"
Eli Cook, "A Statistical Frontier: Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and the making of American markets"
Stephen Cha-Kim, "The Political Economy of Legal Institutions: Some Insights from Ancient Rome"
Roberto Foa, "Are institutions Portable? Settlement Patterns and Patterns of Governance"
Robinson Hall, Basement Seminar Room
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Fall Semester 2009:
September 2: Introductory Meeting
Robinson Hall, Basement seminar room
September 21: Reading Session: Foundations
Robinson Hall, Basement seminar room
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944 / 2001). Introduction and pp. 35-80.
E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 50: 76-136 (1971).
Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism
Douglass North and Barry Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth Century England,” Journal of Economic History, 49: 803-832.
October 5: Reading Session: Labor
Robinson Hall, lower library
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, in Robert Heilbroner, ed., The Essential Adam Smith, Book I: Introduction, 159-161; Chapter 1, 161-171; Chapter 8, 194-208; Chapter 10, 210-219.
Karl Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed, The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.), pp. 203-217.
E.P. Thomson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 9-14.
Ira Katznelson, "Working Class Formation, Constructing Cases and Comparisons," in Katznelson and Zolberg eds., Working-Class Formation, pp. 3-44.
Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War [pages tba]
Robert Steinfeld, “The Problem of Waged Labor” (Oct. 2007)
Paper outline due on October 12.
October 26: Speaker: Marcel van der Linden, Institute for Social History, Amsterdam
Robinson Hall, lower library
"Conceptualizing the World Working Class (click to download paper)."
Commentators:
John Womack, Department of History, Harvard University
Stefan Link, Department of History, Harvard University
November 9: Tami Friedman, Brock University, Ontario
Robinson Hall, lower library
Supplemental reading:
Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development and The Transformation of The South 1938-1980, Ch 3, pp. 63-88
James Cobb, The Selling Of The South: The Southern Crusade For Industrial Development 1936-90, Ch. 4, pp. 96-122.
Commentators:
Ben Sachs, Harvard Law School
Devon Coleman, Harvard Law School
November 16: Reading Session: Commodities
Robinson Hall, basement seminar room
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, ch. 26-29.
David Harvey, Spaces of Capital,
“The Geography of Capitalist accumulation: A reconstruction of the Marxian Theory” 237-266.
Gary Gereffi, Miguel Korzeniewicz, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism pp. 1-20. And 48-51
Jennifer Bair ed. Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research pp. 1-35
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, pp tba.
November 23: Jan Abbeloos, University of Ghent
Robinson Hall, lower library
"Born WIth A Copper Spoon: Global Copper and Local Development, 1870-2000"
(click to download paper)
Commentator
Robert Bates, Department of Government, Harvard University
Supplemental readings:
Lauren Benton, “From the World-Systems Perspective to Institutional World History,” Journal of World History 7.2 (1996) 261-295.
(Harvard link)
Jeniffer Bair, “Global Capitalism and Commodity Chains: Looking Back,Going Forward,” Competition and Change 9.2 (2005) 153-180. (Harvard link)
