Dear RSF:

Please join us next Wednesday, 3/24 at 11:00 for Visiting Scholar Kim Phillips-Fein’s presentation, “Forgotten Men: William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie, Booker T. Washington and the Defense of Inequality.”

Professor Phillips-Fein holds dual appointments at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and in New York University’s History Department at the College of Arts and Science. She has been at New York University since 2012 and received her Ph.D. in American History from Columbia. Her most recent book, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Metropolitan Books, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in History.

While at Russell Sage, Phillips-Fein has been working on a new book which analyzes the various defenses of economic inequality advanced by American business leaders and economic writers who wrote accounts of capitalism for a wide public audience. Her historical narrative explores the various ways members of the elite wrote about economic inequality, and the arguments they advanced in its defense.