Advising & Mentoring
Most of the graduate students and undergraduates who work with me are interested in how law and policy shape the economic environment, and vice versa. Most also study the structure, culture, and evolution of institutions, including businesses, legal systems, and regulatory bodies, whether firmly within or outside the state, or located on the fuzzy boundary separating those two domains.
Graduate students who wish to undertake a preliminary field under my direction can expect to gain exposure to comparative analysis; I also ask students to read in cognate disciplines as well as history. In the last decade, I have served on dissertation committees for history grad students whose work collectively ranges across six continents and six centuries. As the grad students who ask me to serve on their committees can attest, I am a stickler for good writing that is accessible to non-specialists.
Undergraduate honors theses and independent research topics since 2010 have included such topics as:
* regulatory accommodation of credit default swaps in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis;
* the impact of late 19th and early 20th century financial panics on mechanisms of self-regulation in the American banking industry;
* modes of cooperation in the twentieth-century American advertising industry;
* self-regulatory and regulatory responses to the online sale of counterfeit goods in China;
* the role of American consulting firms in shaping European business strategy since 1970;
* regulatory responses to major chemical factory accidents in Europe, India, and the United States
* the role of Better Business Bureaus and other self-regulatory mechanisms in responding to online consumer deception
* regulatory responses to e-cigarettes in the UK, Canada, and the US
* the evolution of Virginia policies toward court-mandated fees and fines since the focusing event at Ferguson, Missouri
In recent years, I also have been working out strategies for collaborative research with undergraduate and graduate teams, through Duke's Bass Connections program.
For some time, I have become convinced that individuals with historical expertise have much to contribute to policy debates and processes. As such, I have given a good deal of thought to the importance of broadening career trajectories for history doctoral recipients, and am increasingly serving as an informal adviser for grad students interested in non-academic career paths.