Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke

I am writing to you in my capacity as the new director of the recently established Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. I wanted to update you on the progress we have made with the Center so far, and also to ask you for your help.

The purpose of the Center is to support research in, and the teaching of, the history of political economy. The larger goal is to revitalize an interest in the history of economic thought among students and within the economics profession as a whole.

To support research, we have a fellowship program, which brings both senior and junior research fellows to Duke for a semester or a year to pursue their own research. Fellows come from around the world. For example, in the 2008-2009 academic year Rob Van Horn (USA) worked on a book on the origins of the Chicago Law and Economics movement, Yann Giraud (France) developed further his research on visualization in economics, Hansjoerg Klausinger (Austria) worked on two volumes he is editing for the /Collected Works of F.A. Hayek/, Aiko Ikeo (Japan) developed some papers for the Critical Biography Series sponsored by the Society for the History of Japanese Economic Thought, and Rob Leonard (Canada) did initial research for a project investigating modernism in the social sciences during the inter-war years. Next year there will be two junior and four senior fellows in residence, as well as a number of visitors coming for shorter stays.

Fellows and visitors have a number of resources on which to draw. There are five faculty members at Duke who specialize in the history of thought, and the Center has a number of affiliated faculty in cognate areas at Duke and on other area campuses. We have an active workshop series, weekly luncheons where work in progress is discussed, and various special events. During the 2008-2009 academic year the last included a one day mini-conference on Creative Communities in Economics, a panel discussion on “John Maynard Keynes of Bloomsbury” held at the Nasher Art Museum (this was the kick-off event for the Center), and the annual HOPE conference, this one organized by Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine on “The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and the Neighboring Disciplines Since 1945.” The world-class combined Triangle Libraries system has extensive holdings that are available to all Fellows through Duke's Perkins Library, which is located literally footsteps away from the Center. Fellows have workspaces assigned to them, either in the Center itself or in private library carrels located in the library. Finally, Duke is home to the Economists’Papers Project, a collection which includes the papers of 8 Nobel laureates in economics, as well as such luminaries as Carl Menger, Oskar Morgenstern, Nicholas Geogescu-Roegen, Tibor Scitovsky, Arthur Burns, Don Patinkin, Paul Davidson, and many others, as well as the papers of the American Economic Association.

To support teaching, we encourage junior fellows to sit in on or assist us with the many courses we offer at Duke. These courses may also be taken by undergraduates or graduate students enrolled at two neighboring universities, UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State. We are also organizing a Summer Teaching Institute, to begin summer 2010, that will be a sort of “Boot Camp” on the history of thought, aimed at helping faculty who may not have had training in the field to be able to offer a course in it. For more information on the various initiatives of the Center, please visit our website at www.econ.duke.edu/CHOPE.

I hope that you will agree that the Center is an exciting new development, and that you might be willing to help us to accomplish our goals. So how might you help us?

1. First, if you have good undergraduate students with an interest in the history of economic thought who might be going on to graduate school in economics, please let them know about our program and let them know that they can take courses in the field at Duke if they enroll at Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, or NC State.
2. Next, if you know of graduate students who want to do research in the history of political economy and who might benefit from a year at Duke, either as they finish up their dissertation or as a post-doc, tell them about us.
3. If you have a colleague who might benefit from our Summer Teaching Institute, let them know about us.
4. Finally, if you have a semester research leave or a sabbatical year coming up and would like to explore the possibility of spending all or part of it here at Duke, send me an e-mail or give me a call, I’d be happy to discuss it with you.

We are excited about the prospects of building a community of like-minded scholars here at Duke. I appreciate any support that you might be able to give us to help us to reach our goals. Should you be attending the upcoming HES meetings in Denver, I will be there and will be happy to discuss with you any matters of interest relating to the Center.

My best regards,
Bruce Caldwell