Colleen Dunlavy
Professor

Email: cdunlavy@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)263-1854
Office: 5109 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5005 Mosse Humanities

Website: http://history.wisc.edu/dunlavy/

Curriculum Vitae: View PDF

Office Hours: Tuesdays 5:30 - 6:30, Thursdays 5:30 - 6:30, or by appointment

Education: PhD: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; MA: BA: University of California - Berkeley

Bio Sketch:

My interests center on what I have come to think of as the history of capitalism -- an amalgam of business history, the history of technology, labor history, legal history, and political economy, with healthy doses of (quantitative) economic, social, and cultural history. At heart, I am a comparativist with special interests in the U.S. and Europe (especially Germany) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A key theme motivating my research, writing, and teaching is the relationship between political and economic change -- in particular, understanding the manifold ways in which politics, broadly construed, has shaped economic change. Under the rubric of "politics," I include not only policymaking (regulation and promotion) but also the (largely overlooked) effects on capitalist activity of the overall structure of political institutions.

My current research interests include: the history of shareholder voting rights in the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany in the nineteenth century; the history of "economic history" since the turn of the the twentieth century; the history of chain stores in the U.S. and Germany, 1870s-1930s; and the standardization movement in the U.S. and internationally in the 1920s.

Selected Publications:

• With Thomas Welskopp.  “Peculiarities and Myths:  Comparing U.S. and German Capitalism.”  German Historical Institute Bulletin no. 41 (Fall 2007): 33-64.
• “Social Conceptions of the Corporation:  Insights from the History of Shareholder Voting Rights.”  Washington and Lee Law Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (2006): 1347-1388.  Reprinted in Rivista delle società, nr. 2/2007 March-April.
• “Why Did Some American Businesses Get So Big?”  In Major Problems in American Business History.  Edited by Regina Blaszczyk and Philip Scranton.  New York:  Houghton-Mifflin, 2006.  pp. 257-263.
• “From Citizens to Plutocrats:  19th-Century Shareholder Voting Rights and Theories of the Corporation.”  In Constructing Corporate America:  History, Politics, Culture, eds. Kenneth Lipartito and David Sicilia.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004.  Pp. 66-93.
• Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia. Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Ira Katznelson, Marin Shefter, and Theda Skocpol. Princeton Studies in Business and Technology, edited by David Hounshell. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994
  

Courses Taught:

Lecture Courses:

• History 247 - American Business History Syllabus 2013 (pdf)
• History 411 - History of American Tehnology
• History 537 - Theories of History

Undergraduate Seminars:

• History 500 - Reading Seminar in History - Topics: "History Politics of Capialism - The Corporation"
• History 600 - Advanced Seminar in History - Topics: "American Capitalism" Syllabus 2009 (pdf); "Corporations in American History" Syllabus 2007 (pdf)
• History 680/690 - Honors Thesis Colloquium Syllabus 2010 (pdf)

Graduate Courses:

• History 703 - History and Theory
• History 753 - Seminar—Comparative World History - Topics: "The Industrial Powers, 1860s-1910s"
• History 822 - Studies in Economic History - Topics: "History Politics of Capitalism - The Corporation"
• History 900 - Intro to History for U.S. Historians Syllabus 2011 (pdf)
• History 901 - Studies in American History