The workshop will meet regularly on Fridays during term to discuss pre circulated papers. The papers will represent the cutting edge of scholarship at the interface between historically inflected work between the humanities and the social sciences. Each workshop will begin with the response from an affiliated graduate student to be followed by lively and free ranging discussion.
Stephanie L. Mudge is Associate Professor (effective July 2018) of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She is a historical, political, and economic sociologist specialized in the theoretically-driven analysis of Western politics, economies, and expertise.
Professor Mudge’s new book, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism (May 2018, Harvard University Press), develops a century-long comparative, historical, and biographically-sensitive analysis of the American Democrats, the German and Swedish Social Democrats, and the British Labour Party. Focusing on the central role experts play as interpreters, representatives, and spokespersons inside political parties, the book tracks how close mid-20th Century ties between economics professions and center-left parties hitched their fates to each other–such that when economics changed, left parties changed with it. The result was a new role for economists as spokespersons for markets and, alongside them, the rise of new strategic experts and policy specialists who spoke for ‘what wins’ and ‘what works.’ The result, however, was a declining capacity to meaningfully represent the historical poor, working, and middle-class constituencies of left parties.