The Department of History welcomes Alexia Yates, Visiting Professor of Modern French History!
Alexia Yates is a historian of economic life, focusing on urban political economy and business history in Europe. As an urban historian, her work on private development in urban environments aims to add to our understanding of the spatiality of human life by exploring how global processes are transformed and contested in the local production of social space. As a historian of capitalism, she focuses on the cultural context of business practices in order to investigate and emphasize the role of moral economies in the structure and functioning of economic systems. Yates approaches the study of economic life as a lens for questioning the status of the economy and the market in our contemporary moment. Her current research investigates how the stock market came to occupy a quotidian place in the lives of ordinary French people in the nineteenth century, and how that position evolved in the twentieth.
Originally from Newfoundland, she completed her undergraduate studies at Smith College, and subsequently received her MA in history from the University of Toronto and a PhD from the University of Chicago. Her doctoral work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the French embassy’s Bourse Chateaubriand, and the Quinn Foundation. Most recently, she held a Prize Fellowship in Economics, History, and Politics at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and a Mellon/Newton Interdisciplinary Fellowship at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge.
Her forthcoming book will be released October 2015:
Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital (Forthcoming, Harvard University Press, October 2015):
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088214
Welcome Alexia!