2024-2025 Schedule
All meetings on Fridays from 2 pm to 4 pm unless otherwise noted. All meetings in the History Department Lounge (CH209) with the exceptions (see below). Queries to Dan Raff (raff@wharton.upenn.edu).
Upcoming dates
November 1: Symposium on Explanation in History, the Social Sciences, and Places in Between
Please note noon start time.
The opening event of the PEHF year will be a symposium entitled “Explanation in History, the Social Sciences, and Places in Between” and it will take place on Friday, November 1st, [Friday of this week] in College Hall 209 (CH 209). There should be real stimulus—real food for thought--in it. A catered lunch from Di Bruno Brothers will be available from noon or so (past experience suggests that 12:15 should be safe) and there will be the Di Bruno Brothers version of milk-and-cookies at some appropriate moment later in the afternoon. The proceedings proper will begin at 1pm and continue until their natural end or 4pm sharp, whichever comes first.
The first hour of the symposium will be occupied with short statements about the form explanation takes and the role it plays in the field and in the personal work of five panelists: Walter Licht (Annenberg Professor of History emeritus, a History Department-style economic historian, for more detail cf. https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/faculty/walter-licht), Karen Ho (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, most well known for her Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009)), Roger Bohn (Professor of Management emeritus at UC-SD and Visiting Scholar, Stanford Medical School, cf. Bohn and Jaikumar, From Filing and Fitting to Flexible Manufacturing [incorporating a long essay of Bohn’s entitled “From Art to Science in Manufacturing: The Evolution of Technological Knowledge”] (Boston: Now Publishers, 2005) and Daredevils to SYSOPS: How the Art of Flying Became (Mostly) a Science (in progress)), myself (trained economist and auto-didact economic and business historian, appointments in Management, History, and the Law School at Penn and a longtime Research Associate at NBER), and Amy Wrzesniewski (recently poached by Wharton from Yale to be Egan Professor of Management in the Department’s Organizational Behavior [actually individual behavior in organizational contexts] group). Open discussion amongst the panelists and members of the audience, which will include various locals and I hope also people from parts of the University with which we do not interact much, will occupy the rest of the time.
As ever, all are welcome. Please RSVP with Dan Raff (raff@wharton.upenn.edu).
November 15: Expansive Exchanges: Chinese Financial Imagination and Japanese Stock Markets in China
Bryna Goodman (Oregon)
Paper available
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December 6: A Capital’s Capital: Wealth and Inequality in Paris 1807-2023
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (Cal Tech)
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January 24: General Laws and the Emergence of Durable Political Parties: The Case of Pennsylvania
Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale and Michigan)
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February 21: The Camera’s I: On the Liberal Invention of Photography
Michael Zakim
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February 28: Economic Warfare on the part of Germany and the UK during WWII
Mark Harrison (Warwick), Reading 1 and Reading 2
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March 28: The United States as a Developing Nation: Capitalism and the American State
Stefan Link (Dartmouth) and Noam Maggor (Queen Mary)
The March 28th session will be a symposium and general discussion of an ongoing project of Stefan Link of Dartmouth College and Noam Maggor of Queen Mary University London on "The United States as a Developing Nation". They offer two papers (linked to here and here) as background reading.
We will meet as usual in CH 209. There will be a buffet lunch available from 12:30. Brief introductory comments from the authors and comments from a group of panelists will begin at 1. After a short break, we will resume with general discussion and responses from Stefan and Noam. The session will conclude at 4 or, if we are clearly not done by then, at any rate not later than 4:30.
All are welcome.
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April 25: Claudia Goldin (Harvard) (joint with Economics)
Note: 10am start
Location: Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics at 133 South 36th Street
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Updates:
Rescheduled, September 27: Kimberly Bowes (Penn)
Book symposium planned for October 10, 2025, details to follow in spring
Penn Economic History Forum Archive