When Steve Meardon was a PhD student at Duke University in the mid-1990s, the campus, and the town that surrounded it, were very different places.

One recent afternoon I’m with Steve as he points to several buildings at Duke that were constructed in the 2000s. “Bostock, the addition to the Divinity School, the von der Heyden Pavilion where I now get my coffee . . . I hardly recognize half of the campus.”  Or half of Durham, he adds. Back then, for entertainment and dining in the Bull City, there were Brightleaf Square, Ninth Street—“and nowhere else.” But today, Steve, who is living here for the year with his wife and two young sons, goes to restaurants downtown and in the old tobacco warehouse district.

“It’s like being here for the very first time,” he says.

He and his family are renting a house in Old North Durham, a part of the city that he never went to when he was a graduate student. “Now that I’m here with my family, I get to know the city in a way I didn’t know it before. We went to a Bulls baseball game, and just a couple of weeks ago we took our sons to a science fair on campus, one designed for children, where they got to play with fire and make gooey substances.”

Steve, who teaches economics and Latin American studies at Bowdoin College, is spending 2011–12 as a Senior Research Fellow at the Center. He is currently researching the responses of free-trade and protectionist doctrines in the United States to a century and a half of changes in economic ideas, moral callings, and political circumstances. He is especially interested in the doctrinal treatment of “reciprocity”: the attempt to secure a level footing with trade partners using a range of instruments, including treaties, executive agreements, countervailing duties, and implicit bargains. Last fall, he presented at a HOPE Center workshop a paper on Mathew Carey, who was a Philadelphia publisher and protectionist proselytizer.  In the paper, Steve links Carey to Alexander Hamilton’s notion of “a reciprocity of advantages.” Two other papers he is working on take up the history of trade deals between the United States and Colombia and the political and doctrinal influences of U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s trade agreements program during the late 1930s.

During his fellowship at the Center Steve plans to look at the papers of Lauchlin Currie, who spent many years in Colombia, first as part of a World Bank mission and then as a citizen. Currie’s papers are part of the Economists’ Papers Project, which is housed in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke.

For Steve, being at the Center in frequent contact with other historians of thought, including the faculty members who were once his advisers, has produced results he would have gotten nowhere else. Remember the paper on Carey and Hamilton? Over lunch one day, Steve mentioned to Neil De Marchi that he was presenting it at a conference in Philadelphia. In the audience would be a historian whose interpretation of Hamilton Steve was explicitly challenging. Neil advised Steve to send the historian the paper directly; that way, Steve would signal to him a willingness to receive the criticism he was likely to give. “It was great advice,” Steve says, “and I wouldn’t have thought of it had Neil not mentioned it. My own responsibility may be to give advice to young scholars, but I’m still at a point in my career where I’m able to benefit from the wisdom of the Neil De Marchis of our field. That’s what makes a fellowship at the HOPE Center so valuable.”

--Paul Dudenhefer