Andrew Seal

About

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I am a historian, teaching in the Economics Department at the Paul College of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire. I took my PhD with distinction from Yale University in 2017 and graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College.

My work lies at the intersection of intellectual history, the history of capitalism, and American Studies. My research and writing are driven by an interest in the history of the middle class, and particularly by the question of how members of the middle class have conceptualized their position in society, and how they have argued for the specificity and value of their economic functions as managers, professionals, and small business entrepreneurs.

I am exploring this history in two book projects, The Common Man: The U.S. Middle Class between Populism and Professionalism, 1870-1970 and Human Capital: The Career of an Idea. You can read more about those two projects here and here.

My work has been published in both academic and popular venues, including the American Historical Review, n+1, Dissent, Slate, The Washington Post, Enterprise & Society, Journal of American Studies, Journal of Politics, Religion, and Ideology, Middle West Review, Public Seminar, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. I am also an assistant editor and regular writer for the US Intellectual History Blog. You can find my USIH writing here. I publish a Substack newsletter about literature and literary culture called Blographia Literaria; you can subscribe to it here.