The Exchange

As the new academic year begins, we offer a round-up of workshops, forums, and discussion groups in business and economic history; please check each website for more detailed information; some groups may  not have posted Fall 2010 information. In addition to their value for those able to participate directly, these groups often maintain mailing lists and sometimes make speakers' papers freely available. Business History Seminar , HBS Business History Unit Seminars , LSE Business History @ Erasmus Seminars Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society (Hagley) Research Seminars Columbia University Seminar in Economic History Harvard Economic History Workshop History and Economics Seminar , Harvard University Institute for Economic and Business History Research , Stockholm Northwestern Workshop in Economic History PEAES Fellows Colloquium , Library Company of Philadelphia Penn Economic History Forum Von Gremp Workshop in Economic and Entrepreneurial History...

The Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in Early American Economy and Society ( PEAES ), in collaboration with the Visual Culture Program , will hold a conference on "Representations of Economy: Lithography in America from 1820 to 1860."   The conference will meet in Philadelphia on October 15, 2010.  It is free and open to all those interested, but registration is required.  As the organizers explain: Interior view of L. J. Levy & Co.’s Dry Goods Store, Philadelphia, c. 1857 (Free Library of Philadelphia) Most Americans living in the four decades after 1820 witnessed rapid and deep changes in their economic conditions. . . .The great variety of changes wrought in America during this era was captured in print by an array of artists, draftsmen, printers, and distributors in the new profession of lithography. They created hundreds of graphic works, printed ephemera, and stunning hand-colored plates that conveyed the nature of economic changes. Lithogra...

The Harvard-Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Business History is awarded for twelve months' residence, study, and research at Harvard Business School, July 1, 2011-June 30, 2012. The fellowship is open to scholars who, within the last ten years, have received a Ph.D. in history, economics, or a related discipline. The fellowship has two purposes: The first is to enable scholars to engage in research that will benefit from the resources of Harvard Business School and the larger Boston scholarly community. About two-thirds of the fellow's time will be available for research of his or her own choosing. A travel fund and a book fund will be provided. The second purpose is to provide an opportunity for the fellow to participate in the activities of Harvard Business School. Approximately one-third of the fellow's time will be devoted to school activities, including attendance of the Business History Seminar, and working with faculty teaching the business history courses offere...

McIntyre Hall The School of Business and Leadership at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, announces two openings for full-time, tenure-track positions open to candidates with a Ph.D. in business history. 1. Assistant or Associate Professor of Management (for complete posting and instructions). The person hired will teach undergraduate courses in management, primarily introductory management as well as elective courses in areas such as human resource management, international business, European or Asian business, research methods, leadership, or strategy.  Qualifications include Ph.D. (ABD considered) in management and a commitment to undergraduate teaching and liberal arts education. Will consider Ph.D. in appropriate related disciplines, such as psychology, economics, political science, sociology, education, communication, and history.  2. Assistant or Associate Professor of Marketing (for complete posting and instructions). The person hired wi...

The German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., has issued calls for papers for two upcoming conferences of interest to business and economic historians: I. "Economic Crime and the State in the Twentieth Century: A German-American Comparison," to be held at the GHI on April 14-16, 2011; the convenor is Mario Daniels. The call for papers: In view of the widely reported cases of corruption and fraud in companies such as Volkswagen, Siemens, and Enron, as well as the public outrage that followed in the wake of these scandals, it is surprising to note that relatively little historical research on economic crime in the twentieth century has been conducted to date. Although neighboring disciplines such as law, economics, political science, and sociology offer attractive approaches to the phenomenon of economic crime, they reflect little on the continuous changes in how illegal and immoral behavior has been defined and understood in the business world since the lat...

The Business History Group in Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneurial Management Unit and Baker Library Historical Collections announce a new online resource — Latin American Business History: Resources and Research . Laura Linard from Historical Collections explains: The Business History Group has made the globalization of research and teaching of business history a high priority and has a strong interest in facilitating research on Latin American business history, especially within the Southern Cone of the continent, initially Chile and Argentina. . . . Included in this Web resource are excerpts from oral histories with twenty-one leading business practitioners from Argentina and Chile, conducted by HBS Research Fellow Dr. Andrea Lluch.  . . .  These interviews are a valuable resource for research on the business history of Argentina and Chile since the 1960s. The interview transcripts are available only for academic and scholarly research upon request from Baker Library ...

Kim Phillips-Fein's recent book, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (Norton, 2009, and out in paperback in January 2010), was recently mentioned by NYT op-ed columnist Frank Rich , who wrote: "[Tea Party financial backers] are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled 'Invisible Hands' in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R." Phillips-Fein , who teaches history at New York University, has written and spoken about her research widely in the last year.  Her own pieces can be found on The Huffington Post ( "Fighting the New Deal All Over Again" and "'Invisible Hands': The Dangerous Power of Business" ), and video presentations on BookTV ,  Progressive Book Club , and HNN (2009 OAH paper). Phillips...

Harvard University announces a new program of three-year postdoctoral fellowships in economics, history, and politics, to be held at the university between 2011 and 2016. In the words of the announcement , The fellowships are intended "to encourage outstanding scholarship within and across the disciplinary limits of economics, history, politics and related subjects. We particularly encourage the nomination of scholars whose work addresses questions of lasting importance to the understanding of economic change." Further, The Program seeks outstanding candidates early in their scholarly careers, and is looking for truly extraordinary scholars. We expect that candidates will have completed their routine training for advanced study and will be far along in the dissertation stage, able to submit samples of independent work (articles, papers, dissertation chapters) in support of their candidacies. If still pursuing the Ph.D., Prize Fellows should be prepared to finish t...

The European Business History Association (EBHA), in conjunction with Hellenic Open University, will hold its fifteenth annual meeting at the National Technical University in Athens, Greece, August 24-26, 2011.  The theme of the conference will be "Business Finance and the State in the 20th Century: European Comparisons in Historical Perspectives–Crises and Transformation." The call for papers explains: The theme of the conference refers to the debate and discussion of economic crises and recessions in the 20th century, stimulated by the onslaught of the first severe recession of the 21st century. The contradictions of globalisation have set in motion a process of introspection and questioning about the role of business, finance and the state and a need to study the past, rethink concepts and processes, find keys to understanding the present and working towards a solution for the future. Relations between business and the world of finance, on the one hand, an...

As widely reported in the press last Friday, Dutch graduate student Ruben Schalk, working in the West Frisian archives on research for his Master's degree at the University of Utrecht, found what appears to be the oldest share of Dutch East India Company (VOC) stock; the share previously thought to be the oldest is dated September 27, 1606, whereas the share Schalk found is dated September 9, 1606. The document will anchor an exhibit at the Westfries Museum running from September 10 to November 21, 2010, accompanied by a useful on-line exhibit providing historical details and a zoomable view of the share document. Readers might also be interested in Larry Neal's PowerPoint presentation on "Venture Shares of the Dutch East India Company" for his course last spring at the London School of Economics. Neal, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Illinois, is currently a visiting professor at the LSE. He is most recently the editor, with Jeremy Atack, o...

We want to remind students writing dissertations in business history and their advisors about the Oxford Journals Doctoral Colloquium in Business History , which will be held in conjunction with the 2011 BHC annual meeting in St. Louis. This prestigious workshop, sponsored by the BHC and generously funded by the Journals Division of Oxford University Press, will take place Wednesday evening, 30 March 2011, and all day Thursday, 31 March 2011. The Colloquium offers a small group of graduate students an opportunity to work intensively on their dissertations with distinguished Business History Conference-affiliated scholars, including at least two BHC officers. The Colloquium is limited to ten students. Participants will discuss dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and employment opportunities in business history. The Colloquium is intended for doctoral candidates in the early stages of their dissertation projects. If you are interested in bei...

The Third Graduate Student Conference on the History of Capitalism will be held at Harvard University on March 4-6, 2011. "Capitalism in Action" is the theme of the meeting, which will feature Jackson Lears as the keynote speaker. The following call for papers has been issued: Discussions of American capitalism often uncritically rely on loaded but abstract terms, from “markets” to “capital.” This conference aims to bring together emerging scholars who are interested in interrogating the nitty-gritty details of how capitalist systems have been imagined, constructed, maintained, altered, and challenged by an array of different historical actors in the United States and across the globe. What does “the economy” look like once we shift our focus from intangible market models toward the concrete workings of capitalist society and culture? In this conference, we hope to expand our understanding of American history by analyzing many different moments of “capitalism in action.” ...

The European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE), which will hold its next meeting in Bordeaux, France, on 28-31 October 2010, has now posted the preliminary program . The theme of the conference, to be held at the University of Montesquieu Bordeaux IV and locally organized by GREThA (Groupe de Recherche en Économie théoretique et Appliquée), is "Economic Crisis and the Renewal of the European Model(s): Revisiting the Debate on Varieties of Capitalism." The many session topics include "Theories of the Firm," "Revisiting the Debate on the Varieties of Capitalism," "Innovation and Technological Change," and "Knowledge, Innovation, and Economic Performances." For full information about the conference, including registration materials, please visit the EAEPE 2010 Conference website; for more information about EAEPE itself, please visit their homepage .

Tiffany Gill's recent book, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry , has been given the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award for best publication from the Association of Black Women Historians . The award will be bestowed at the ABWH luncheon in Raleigh, North Carolina, on October 2, 2010, at the ASALH (Association for the Study of African American Life and History) annual meeting. Professor Gill teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. Beauty Shop Politics , mentioned here earlier , examines the ways in which black beauticians in the Jim Crow era used their economic independence and access to a public community space as platforms for activism.

Academics, practitioners, and research students are invited to submit competitive abstracts and papers for presentation at the second International History of Public Relations Conference , to be held July 6-7, 2011, at Bournemouth University in England. Papers for presentation at the 2011 conference will be selected, after peer review, on the basis of abstracts of no more than two pages total length, including any references. Author details must be printed on a separate sheet and the author(s) should not be identified in the abstract. For a list of possible themes and topics, please see the full call for papers on the IHPRC site. Papers are especially welcome from scholars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Please send abstracts to Professor Tom Watson, conference chair, The Media School, Bournemouth University, prhistory@bournemouth.ac.uk . The deadline for submission of abstracts is Monday, December 6, 2010 . Those interested in presenting might find it helpful to look at th...

In April 2011, Brown University and Harvard University will jointly host a conference on slavery and American economic development. The conveners, Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman , are currently seeking proposals for papers that explore the intertwined histories of slavery and capitalism in the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The conference seeks to showcase scholarship that integrates quantitative and qualitative sources, draws on social, cultural, and political history, and incorporates insights from political economy, law, and critical theory. A range of topics and approaches are desired, including (but not limited to) biography; local and institutional studies; investigations of the manufacturing and financial sectors; questions of human capital and migration; histories of labor, management, and business practices; and accounts of inter-regional economic and political integration. Please send a 2-3 page proposal and c.v. to Seth_Rockman@brown.edu by Se...