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Quinn Slobodian is the Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas at Wellesley College and will join the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University as a professor of international history in January 2024. He is also an associate fellow at Chatham House and co-director of the History and Political Economy Project. He is also a frequent commenter on contemporary politics in the New York Times, Guardian, and New Statesman. His most recent book is Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Previous publications include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism and Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I think we are at an exciting moment for the conversations between neighbouring disciplines, even if the reasons are not always cheerful. From the discipline of history, the move is motivated partially by necessity. As the conventional arenas for scholarly production and exchange begin to dry up with the decline of enrollments, majors, and new tenure-track lines in our field, we are compelled to find new arenas of engagement. 

There's also a political background. The moment's local or global challenges force us to draw on different skill sets and work collaboratively. My micro-version of this is concocting an initiative with Johns Hopkins University sociologist Christy Thornton to create more space and resources for something that we call History and Political Economy borrowing from the successful example of Law and Political Economy. 

What can be done in this space is wide open. We are supporting early career scholars returning to local intellectual histories of nearly forgotten knowledge producers in the Global South from earlier in the 20th century, inquiries into the dynamics of sexuality and gender in the process of welfare reform, projects about how large asset managers and institutional investors operate globally, to name just a few of the ongoing projects. The history of political economy is a moving target in the best way: it spits out new topics and fields of inquiry as conditions change. 

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

My books have been a record of my encounter with broader political events. The book that started as my dissertation, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Duke UP, 2012), was about the encounter of young West German students with political actors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 1960s. It emerged from the sense of anger and futility around the efforts at international solidarity during the US-led invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. It came out of despair at the disconnect between broad-based social movements and the world's most powerful actors. 

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard UP 2018) was concerned with this problem of elites differently. It was an artefact of the Obama years, which were themselves—sometimes self-consciously—a rerun of the Clinton years. In the 1990s, as in a few years after 2008, there was a kind of complacency around the effects of economic globalization on the organization of people's........

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