Deirdre McCloskey taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2000 to 2015 in economics, history, English, and communication. A well-known economist and historian and rhetorician, she has written 17 books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistical theory to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. She is known as a “conservative” economist, Chicago-School style (she taught in the Economics Department there from 1968 to 1980, and in History), but protests that “I’m a literary, quantitative,...

This public lecture is sponsored by the Center for the History of Political Economy, the program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and the program in American Values and Institutions at Duke University.The series is supported by a grant from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.