Jonathan Levy cchen Wed, 09/13/2023 - 14:01 Jonathan Levy Associate Faculty Member, Law School
Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
Faculty Chair, Law, Letters, and Society
Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the College James Westfall Thompson Professor of US History, Fundamentals, Social Thought, and the College Social Science Research Building, room 504 Mailbox 32 (773) 702-8369 jlevy@uchicago.edu

University of Chicago, PhD '08

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of the economy, the United States, and capitalism. In addition to being a member of the Department of History and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought I am the current Faculty Director of the Law, Letters, and Society program.

My most recent 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.

My next book, The Real Economy: History and Theory (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025) argues for a novel theory of the economy, its history, and its politics. It draws inspiration from the economics of Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes, and seeks to offer a theory of the economy that is open to rich empirical and theoretical study from across the social sciences and humanities.

My future research projects include The Midas Touch, a global history of the demand for money from ancient times through the present, as well a planetary history of the city of Houston. I wrote a series of essays on Houston for the Visualizing Climate and Loss Project at Harvard’s Center for History and Economics.

My 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.

Recent Courses Offered

Undergraduate

• Property and the Public Interest
• The United States, 2000-2008
• History of Populism in the United States

Graduate

• The Global History of Money
• Topics in US History: The New Deal
• Emergence of Capitalism

Intellectual Legal Political Economy Race United States Professors (History) Faculty

United States; economic history; capitalism; global and comparative history; legal history; intellectual history; slavery and emancipation