Two current Heilbroner Faculty Fellows, Emma Park and Aaron Jakes, are members of an interdisciplinary team of researchers at The New School that has been awarded a $225,000 Sawyer Seminar grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. With her fellow co-principal investigator Gustav Peebles, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the SPE, Emma Park, Assistant Professor of History at the NSSR and Eugene Lang, will lead the two-year initiative entitled “Currency and Empire: Monetary Policy, Race, and Power. ” The seminar will gather New School faculty, graduate students, and guests to explore the relationship between monetary systems, the production and consolidation of racial difference, and imperial power.
The Heilbroner Center asked Prof. Park how she and the other scholars came together to generate and develop the idea for the Sawyer seminar and how graduate students could get involved in its programming and activities over the next two years.
“Funnily, this grant would not have happened without an impromptu run-in on the platform of the Dekalb subway station on a day when the Q train was running behind schedule. Gustav and I bumped into each other on the way to campus. Having said ‘hello,’ we parted ways.” But later that day, Park received an email from Peebles about an upcoming funding deadline for the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar. That day, they met for coffee, chatted about each other’s works, and came up with potential collaborators for the incipient project.
“At that meeting, I told Gustav about Aaron Jakes and the course we had taught, ‘States of Taxation: A Global History of Sovereign Seizure,’ and suggested we bring Aaron on board, Gustav agreed. And then there were three.” Emma Park said. “In discussion, we decided that one of the goals was to bring the sphere of economics outside of the narrowly technocratic realm, at which point bringing on Sanjay G. Reddy and Paulo L. dos Santos seemed like an obvious choice. Both cordially agreed to join us in this venture.”
After many iterations, the team of scholars worked together on producing the proposal itself and settling on the theme of Currency and Empire: Monetary Policy, Race, and Power. “Julia Ott and Will Milberg were supportive throughout, and kindly offered Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies as an institutional home for the Seminar,” Park said.
“Dean Milberg and I are thrilled to see how our programming at the Heilbroner Center has borne fruit,” says Director Julia Ott. “Each of the faculty involved in this successful grant have played a role at the Center, either as faculty research fellows, co-instructors in our signature graduate and undergraduate courses, or by contributing their own courses as electives in our graduate and undergraduate minors. This award demonstrates how the Heilbroner Center advances faculty and graduate research by routinizing and institutionalizing critical studies of capitalism at the New School. Congratulations!”
So far, with Gustav Peebles, Park has hired two RAs to help run the Seminar. And they expect to offer two graduate student fellowships for dissertation writing. In addition, the grant will support postdoctoral visitors. “Aside from general participation in the programming of the seminar, in the Spring of 2021, we will be running a reading group on the topic of monetary policy and empire, which will form the basis of a graduate seminar we will co-teach on the same themes in the Fall of 2021.” Peebles and Park hope that the Seminar and its programming will cultivate a hub for faculty and graduate students to share their research and engage in collective conversation far beyond the Seminar’s conclusion.