James Caton
James Caton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agribusiness and Applied Economics at North Dakota State University and a Faculty Fellow with the Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth. He has written regular columns as a Fellow with the American Institute for Research's Sound Money Project. Dr. Caton earned a Ph.D. in Economics in 2017 from George Mason University, where he was an F.A. Hayek Fellow at the Mercatus Center and holds an M.A. in Economics from San Jose State University. He has published articles in the Southern Economic Journal, The Independent Review, Policy Modeling, Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Review of Austrian Economics, and other peer reviewed journals. His work is broadly informed by the history of economic thought and includes contributions in monetary theory, history, and thought and methodology of the social sciences.
Jeremias Düring
Jeremias Düring is currently a PhD student in the DFG Research Training Group "Transformations of Science and Technology since 1800" at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. My PhD project, which is supervised by Anna Leuschner and Thomas Heinze, is located at the interface between general philosophy of science and philosophy of economics. More specifically, he is investigating how the concept of "scientific pluralism" from general philosophy of science can be brought into the discussion of (a lack of) pluralism in contemporary economics.
More information about his work: https://jeremiasduering.wordpress.com/.
For more information about the Research Training Group: https://grk2696.de/.
Email: jeremias.duering@uni-wuppertal.de
Kobi Finestone
Kobi Finestone completed his Ph.D. in the Philosophy Department from Duke University. After completing a Postdoctoral Research Associate Position at the Smith Institute for Political Economy at Chapman University he has returned to Duke University to join the HOPE Center as a Visiting Scholar before starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego in January 2025. His research lies at the intersection of philosophy and economics, focused on the epistemic capacities of scientific models, the role of expectations and uncertainty in economic thought, and the rights and obligations of business leaders and regulators. During his time at the HOPE Center, he will be researching the Knightian legacy in the works of Robert Lucas Jr. and the broader Rational Expectations Revolution.
Hannah Glasson
Hannah Glasson received her PhD in the spring of 2024 in Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought at Virginia Tech. She is a political theorist with interests in environmental studies, the history of political economy, and the history of technology. Her dissertation examines the political applications of systems theory and cybernetics in the second half of the twentieth century. The dissertation argues that systems theory was more than a scientific theory; it was also a form of political reasoning. Systems theory became a way to conceptualize both systemic forms of control, and the spontaneous emergence of creativity and freedom. Through the lens of the systems concept, Hannah’s analysis aims to uncover under-recognized convergences between ecology, economics, and theories of social order. While at the HOPE center, Hannah will be pursuing several projects. First, she is developing an analysis of attitudes towards emerging information technologies in the late twentieth century. She will show how prominent conceptualizations of information technology drew upon natural and ecological metaphors, and how this understanding of new technologies as lifelike influenced claims about the changing behavior of economic markets. Second, she is developing an analysis of the influence of systems theory and cybernetics on the intellectual trajectory of Friedrich Hayek, and will examine how the prominence of systems theory in Hayek’s writings relates to Hayek’s views about nature.
Julien Gradoz
Julien is a historian of economic thought who completed his thesis in 2023 at the University of Lille in France. His research revolves around two major themes. The first theme examines the integration of “product quality” into economic thought during the 20th century from both historical and epistemological perspectives. The second theme explores the political economy of “repugnant markets.” During his visit to the Center for the History of Political Economy, Julien will focus on the estimation of demand functions in the 1950s, investigating questions related to product quality within this context, and analyzing Edward Hastings Chamberlin’s contributions to these debates.
Email: jgradozwall@gmail.com
For more on Julien, please visit his website: https://sites.google.com/site/gradozjulien
Lisa Kinspergher
Lisa Kinspergher has just graduated from the two-year MA in Political Science at Duke University, with a thesis on social choice theory and the parallels in methodology between political science and economics. She earned her BA in International Politics, Law, and Economics at the University of Milan, Italy in 2022.
While at the HOPE Center, she plans to focus on the relationship between F.A. Hayek and John Dewey, and more generally between classical liberalism and pragmatism. Although both these traditions can be labeled as theories of liberalism, they differ in philosophical influences and normative implications.
Richard Lane
Richard Lane studies the political economy of the environment and its governance from the mid-twentieth century on, with a specific focus on the United States. His research investigates the intersection of neoliberal thought and practice, the development of environmental economics, and the rise of post-WWII Systems Analysis and its managerial applications.
In the fall of 2024, he will start an EU Marie Curie-funded Postdoctoral project based at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Duke University. The project focuses on the institutional history of the Washington DC-based think tank Resources For the Future (RFF) – as a key node in the development and application of environmental economic thought.
Yam Maayan
I obtained my Ph.D. in the Economics department at Tel Aviv University, specializing in the history and methodology of economics. My doctoral research focused on investigating how rational decision under uncertainty models were implemented within neoclassical economics, exploring the methodological and conceptual shifts they have created in normative concepts. During my studies, I was a doctoral fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at TAU and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences at LSE. In addition to my research, I have a keen interest in the pedagogy of economics and the relationship between methodological perceptions and teaching approaches. As a visiting fellow at CHOPE, my current focus lies on the work of mathematical economist Kenneth Arrow. My research revolves around Arrow's conceptualization of the social realm, with a specific emphasis on his contributions made after the 1970s. I am particularly interested in exploring the relationship between his abstract mathematical work and his practical involvement in concrete policy consultation.
For more on Yam, please read her profile.
Email: yamaayan@gmail.com
Soroush Marouzi
Soroush is a historian and philosopher of science, specializing in the history of economic thought and analytic philosophy in interwar Britain. His research focuses on how social scientists and philosophers conceptualize human reason and rationality. During his residency at the HOPE Center, he aims to examine F.A. Hayek’s epistemology and political economy by contextualizing his work within the broader debates on the foundations of knowledge and rationality that emerged in the wake of the Great War in Europe. Soroush earned his PhD from the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto.
For more on Soroush, please see his profile.
Email: soroush.marouzi@duke.edu
Roberto Pereira Silva
Graduated in History with a master's and PhD in Economic History. I'm a professor of economic history and history of economic thought at the University Federal of Alfenas, Brazil. I research Brazilian Economic Thought in the twentieth century, especially on the work of Celso Furtado. This research aims to identify the institutional and political context in which economic ideas emerge to influence economic policy. While in the Center for the History of Political Economy, my research will be on the archive of Earl J. Hamilton, guarded in the Rubinstein Library. I will investigate how his empirical studies on Spanish Price History were received and assimilated by economists such as John Maynard Keynes and by economic historians, mainly the French Fernand Braudel, François Simiand, and Pierre Chaunu. The purpose is to pursue a deeper view of how historical and empirical studies can be used to justify theoretical assessment and, reversely, how theoretical economic propositions can influence historical reconstruction.
Dominic Walker
Dominic Walker is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is based at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and at Magdalene College, where he teaches English Literature.
Dominic's work concerns the relationship (or putative lack thereof) between imaginative literature and postclassical economic thought. His current project aims to provide an empirical rationale for renewed consideration of the role of literary writing in the intellectual biographies of economists who, despite generally seizing on the marginalists' repudiation of 'the flowery path of literature' in a bid for nomothetic credibility, nevertheless produced a richly revealing corpus of extant literary material. He will spend his time at CHOPE further researching historically significant, predominantly anti-"literary" economists who first exercised their economic imaginations in fiction, drama, poetry, and literary criticism.