Dr Sean Vanatta
- Senior Lecturer in Financial History and Policy (Political & International Studies)
email:
Sean.Vanatta@glasgow.ac.uk
616 Gilbert Scott, Main Building, University of Glasgow, g12 8qq
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1340-4720Biography
I write about and teach modern American history, with an emphasis on the political economy of finance. I am currently working on several projects, which collectively address the intersection of democracy, finance, and the regulatory state in modern America.
My first book, Plastic Capitalism: Banks, Credit Cards, and the End of Financial Control (Yale University Press, 2024), reevaluates the rise of finance in the post-World War II United States and, with it, the rise and fall of New Deal economic liberalism. Beginning in the 1950s, the book argues, profit-seeking bankers exploited American federalism to avoid consumer regulations, using credit cards to connect far-flung consumers with volatile, global capital markets, leading to the indebted nation we know today.
With Peter Conti-Brown, I am completing Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in the United States (Princeton University Press, forthcoming). The book examines bank supervision--the processes of continuous government oversight of the financial system--from its development in the 1830s to the Volcker shock in the early 1980s. The book argues that supervision operates as a space where public officials and private bankers negotiate shared management of the residual risks of the financial system.
Finally, as I complete these book projects, I am engaging in a number of other ventures. First, I am examining how state employee pension plans, through their investment activities, helped reshape private financial markets and public welfare in the postwar United States. With Michael R. Glass, I develop some preliminary findings about New York State in an article appearing in Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics. Second, I am developing a new project on global Great Depression, using foreign sovereign debt held by small, rural U.S. banks as a window onto the global financial networks that grew in the interwar years and collapsed and reformed in the 1930s.
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I am currently a senior fellow at the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania. I received my Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2018. Before that, I took MA and undergraduate degrees at the University of Georgia.
Before joining the University of Glasgow in September 2020, I taught in the Gallatin School for Individualized Study at New York University and in Princeton University’s Writing Program. I have also held the National Endowment for the Humanities Hagley Postdoctoral Fellowship in Business, Culture, and Society and the John E. Rovensky Fellowship in US Business and Economic History.
Research interests
- Financial institutions and markets
- Financial regulation and supervision
- Consumer politics and activism
- Economic planning
- Federalism
- Pensions and retirement
- Public infrastructure
- The history of capitalism
- Financialization
- Economic thought
Supervision
I would be excited to supervise research that focuses on modern American history, financial history, business history, or the history of capitalism--broadly defined.
- Li, Xin
The Downfall of UK Pensions, 1960-2000
Teaching
Course Contribution
Economic and Social History 1A and 1B
Researching Economic and Social History 1
Researching Economic and Social History 2
Honours module convening
Money and Finance in United States Society
Masters module convening
Globalization of International Banking and Finance
Designing Your Research Project (Global Economy Research Methods)
Contributions to masters modules
The Globalized Economy
Business in the Global Economy
