Sven Beckert

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. Beckert’s research and teaching center on the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions.

His publications have focused on the history of economic elites, on labor, on democracy and, in recent years, on the global history of capitalism. Beckert teaches courses on the history of American capitalism, Gilded Age America, the political economy of modern capitalism, labor history and global capitalism. He is co-chair of the Program on the Study of Capitalism at Harvard University, and the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History, also at Harvard. Beyond Harvard, he co-chairs an international study group on global history, is co-editor of a series of books at Princeton University Press on “America in the World,”and has co-organized a series of conferences on the history of capitalism. He has received many fellowships and awards, including the Newcomen Fellowship at Harvard Business School, and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Beckert is a Guggenheim Fellow. He has lectured all over the world.