For Shiri Cohen, her move this past fall from Israel to Durham and the HOPE Center coincided with an exciting shift in her life, a shift that raises stimulating questions for her about audience and disciplinary practice. In Israel, where she was a PhD student at Bar-Ilan University, she was finishing her dissertation, writing, she says, for a committee of two—a limited audience who provided clear expectations about how she should write. Today, with her PhD behind her (she completed it at the end of 2010), she is making her way as her own scholar into the history of economics, learning to communicate with an international audience whose expectations and interests are not always so predictable.
Shiri is a 2011-12 Research Fellow at the Center. Her current research aims to understand new representations of utilitarianism by economists, especially Edgeworth and Marshall, in the late 1870s and early 1880s. In her view, Edgeworth and Marshall were quite different from their predecessors on that matter, as they were no longer satisfied with utilitarianism as only a general criterion for policy; they as well regarded it as a part of economic theory that demanded formal mathematical tools.
“I’m having a most wonderful time here,” Shiri says on an unseasonably warm February day in Durham of her fellowship at the HOPE Center. “I feel privileged to work in this relaxed, no-pressure environment. My life here has another pace than it did in Israel. Here it is quiet and inspiring. Sometimes you need pressure to get things done, but in my case being relaxed allows me to be productive and creative.”
As she has interacted with her colleagues at the Center, Shiri has seen her research interests broaden. Her overriding interest is in the connections between economics and philosophy. While conducting her PhD research in Israel, she examined those connections in a British and nineteenth-century context, when the link between the two disciplines was reasonably apparent. But over the past several months—and especially after sitting in last fall on Roy Weintraub’s course on the development of modern economics—she has become interested in the connections between economics and philosophy in a U.S. and twentieth-century context, a century in which, as economics became more professionalized and tool-based, the connections were not as evident. That has also enhanced her teaching by expanding her knowledge and exposing her to current pedagogical approaches in the field.
Being in daily contact with leading historians of economics—she has had, for example, extensive discussions with Neil De Marchi, with whom she shares many research interests —has helped her grow as a writer and professional historian.
“I want to thank everyone here for such a great welcome, for making me feel comfortable on a personal as well as a professional level. That is not something I take for granted, and I really appreciate it.”
--Paul Dudenhefer