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Jonathan Levy is Professor of U.S. History, Fundamentals, and the College. He is also an Associate Faculty Member, University of Chicago Law School; Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture; and Faculty Chair, Law, Letters, and Society, University of Chicago. His research and teaching span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are increasingly preoccupied with global and comparative questions.

He is currently at work on a number of projects. The first is an interpretive history of US capitalism, Ages of American Capitalism, which is forthcoming from Random House. The book narrates American economic life from British colonial settlement to the great recession of 2008.  A related article, “Capital as Process and the History of Capitalism,” is forthcoming from the Business History Review.

A second project concerns the history of investment and global capital markets across the twentieth century, from the perspective of John Maynard Keynes’s concept of "liquidity preference," elaborated in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. This was the subject of a recent series of lectures that he gave at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He has also recently written about the significance of the topic of investment in "Stuck in a Gilded Age," Dissent (Sum. 2016).

Another cluster of his current research concerns the historical relationship between for-profit and nonprofit corporations in the United States. Prof. Levy has published a series of pieces on this topic: "From Fiscal Triangle to Passing Through: Rise of the Nonprofit Corporation,” in Corporations and American Democracy (Cambridge, 2017); "Altruism and the Origins of Nonprofit Philanthropy" in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies: History, Norms, Institutions (Chicago, 2016);  and "Accounting for Profit and the History of Capital," Critical Historical Studies 1, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 171–214.

His first book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard, 2012), is a history of risk in the United States. The book has a dual focus, tracing the simultaneous rise, in the context of slave emancipation, of a new individualist creed that equated freedom with risk-taking and a new corporate financial system of risk management. Freaks of Fortune won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and Avery O. Craven Award and the American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.

He earned his B.A. from Yale University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Source: https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/jonathan-levy