Steering Committee
Dr Peter KnightUniversity of Manchester
Principal Investigator on the Network. Senior lecturer in American Studies. Author of two monographs and editor of two collections on conspiracy theories as a form of pop sociology. Current research extends this interest in folk epistemologies through an analysis of popular understandings of economics and the market in late nineteenth-century America.
Dr Marina Moskowitz
University of Glasgow
Reader in American History. Associate member of Glasgow's Centre for Business History. Cultural historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, with a particular focus on business history, market cultures, and the exchange of goods; author of a cultural history of the notion of the standard of living and the American middle class; grant holder for an ESRC project on the seed trade in the nineteenth-century United States; a trustee of the Business History Society in the US.
Dr Christopher McKenna
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Reader in Business History and Strategy. Programme Head (Reputation & Strategy) of the Oxford Centre on Corporate Reputation. Expert on the historical development of professional firms; first book on the growth of the elite management consulting firms, The World's Newest Profession, was awarded the 2004-2006 Newcomen-Harvard Book Award by the Business History Review and the 2007 Hagley Prize by the Business History Conference; current book project on the international history of white collar crime from the eighteenth century to the present; serves on the editorial boards of Organizational & Management History, Enterprise & Society and the Journal of American Studies; an elected trustee of the Management History Research Group, the Association of Business Historians, and the Business History Conference.
Professor Sven Beckert
Harvard University
Professor of American History. Author of The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie (2001); interested in transnational perspectives on United States history; currently at work on a global history of cotton; founding co-director of the Workshop on Political Economy at Harvard, that brings together faculty and graduate students to study the political economy of capitalism.
Prof. Brook Thomas
University of California, Irvine
Professor of English. Made significant contributions to the development of new historicist approaches to nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, especially the relationship between law, literature and business in works such as American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1997).