‘New Histories of Neo-Liberalism’: 13 October 2022

Panel Discussion

17.00 BST, Thursday 13 October 2022

Watch the recording of this event

Speakers at the event

Professor James Vernon (University of California, Berkeley)
Professor Muriam Haleh Davis (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Professor Gary Gerstle FBA (University of Cambridge)
Professor Quinn Slobodian (Wellesley College, Massachusetts)
Dr Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (University College London)

About the event

Historical studies of neo-liberalism are much in evidence. The early 2020s have seen new monographs, edited collections and journal articles — offering us a growing range of perspectives on this subject. ‘New Histories of Neo-Liberalism’ brings together five historians who’ve made significant recent interventions, with reference to diverse geographies, political structures, chronologies and methodologies. In doing so, the panel will identify and explore a prominent, resonant and much debated theme in historical research.

Working in the UK and United States, our panellists are specialists in the histories of Britain, America and North Africa, as well as in global histories of ideas, and the international reach of Western economic and foreign policy.

‘Neo-liberalism’ offers a broad framework for our panellists’ study of modern political, economic and social history. But it’s equally a subject contested and debated on key points of chronology, political alignment and origin, and its value as a category of historical analysis to explain change over time.

Chaired by Professor James Vernon, this event is an opportunity to discuss shared interests and research in context: to explore areas of common ground, difference, and dispute; to assess the reshaping of national and regional stories when viewed from alternative global perspectives; and to consider what insights we might draw — now and for the future — from new histories of neo-liberalism.

About the panellists

James Vernon is Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. James is a historian of modern Britain with broad comparative and theoretical interests in the relationship between local, national, imperial and global histories. His most recent books include Distant Strangers. How Britain Became Modern (University of California Press, 2014) and Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2017). James’s publications on neo-liberalism include ‘The making of the neoliberal university in Britain’, Critical Historical Studies (2018) and ‘Heathrow and the making of neoliberal Britain’, Past and Present (2021). James is currently working on a new book about the transformation of Britain and its place in the world since the 1940s told through Heathrow Airport.
Muriam Haleh Davis is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Muriam’s monograph, Markets of Civilization: Racial Capitalism and Islam in Algeria, is published in September 2022 by Duke University Press. Her previous titles include North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institution and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2018), co-edited with Thomas Serres.
Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research in American History at the University of Cambridge. Gary’s recent books include Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2015) and A Cultural History of Democracy in the Modern Age, co-edited with Eugenio Biagini (Bloomsbury, 2021). His latest book is The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Quinn Slobodian is Marion Butler MacLean Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College. His most recent monograph is Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), winner of the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize. Quinn’s co-edited collections include (with Dieter Plehwe and Philip Mirowski) Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (Verso Books, 2020) and (also with Dieter Plehwe) Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South (Zone Books, 2022).
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is Associate Professor of Modern British History at UCL. Her books include Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s (UCL Press, 2021), co-edited with Aled Davies and Ben Jackson. Florence’s recent reviews include articles for the London Review of Books.