Drawing on a global and comparative ethnography, this presentation explores how Syrian men and women seeking refuge in a moment of unprecedented global displacement are received by countries of resettlement and asylum—the U.S., Canada, and Germany. It shows that human capital, typically examined as the skills immigrants bring with them that shape their potential, is actually created, transformed, or destroyed by receiving states’ incorporation policies.

Existing development theories predict that factors such as natural resource wealth and the legacies of European colonizers inhibit development. However, the case of Trinidad and Tobago challenges these theories, as a resource-rich former colony that has achieved high levels of development. What accounts for Trinidad and Tobago's development trajectory?

This talk is the presidential address prepared for the one hundred seventeenth annual Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association and originally delivered January 16, 2021.

How do we remake, not simply rebuild, our lives after trauma? Rebuilding suggests a return to a prior state, where the same plans, assumptions, and visions remain in place. Remaking is much more dramatic; it is transformative and generates fundamentally new ways of navigating the world. We often think of significant life transformations as highly individualistic and personal experiences.

The beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers’ efforts to appeal to working-class voters. But regulatory welfare actually began a half century earlier with the passage of child labor laws. Middle-class reformers in Europe and the U.S.

Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2021) uncovers the surprising influence of post-revolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century’s most important international economic institutions.

More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world economy into recession, we still lack an adequate explanation for why it happened. Existing accounts identify a number of culprits—financial instruments, traders, regulators, capital flows—yet fail to grasp how the various puzzle pieces came together. The key is understanding what the banks were doing.

This paper presents the basic argument of a book I am completing on how the Federal Constitution became a site of near unanimous public support in American life.  I argue that the dominance and substantive meaning of constitutional veneration is actually a relatively recent development—the product of a series of interconnected political struggles between the American emergence onto the global stage with the Spanish-American War and World W