Dear SHOE colleagues,

I am writing to you in my capacity as the new 
director of the recently established Center for 
the History of Political Economy at Duke 
University. I wanted to update you on the 
progress we have made with the Center so far, and 
also to ask you for your help.

The purpose of the Center is to support research 
in, and the teaching of, the history of political 
economy. The larger goal is to revitalize an 
interest in the history of economic thought among 
students and within the economics profession as a whole.

To support research, we have a fellowship 
program, which brings both senior and junior 
research fellows to Duke for a semester or a year 
to pursue their own research. Fellows come from 
around the world. For example, in the 2008-2009 
academic year Rob Van Horn (USA) worked on a book 
on the origins of the Chicago Law and Economics 
movement, Yann Giraud (France) developed further 
his research on visualization in economics, 
Hansjoerg Klausinger (Austria) worked on two 
volumes he is editing for the /Collected Works of 
F.A. Hayek/, Aiko Ikeo (Japan) developed some 
papers for the Critical Biography Series 
sponsored by the Society for the History of 
Japanese Economic Thought, and Rob Leonard 
(Canada) did initial research for a project 
investigating modernism in the social sciences 
during the inter-war years. Next year there will 
be two junior and four senior fellows in 
residence, as well as a number of visitors coming for shorter stays.

Fellows and visitors have a number of resources 
on which to draw. There are five faculty members 
at Duke who specialize in the history of thought, 
and the Center has a number of affiliated faculty 
in cognate areas at Duke and on other area 
campuses. We have an active workshop series, 
weekly luncheons where work in progress is 
discussed, and various special events. During the 
2008-2009 academic year the last included a one 
day mini-conference on Creative Communities in 
Economics, a panel discussion on “John Maynard 
Keynes of Bloomsbury” held at the Nasher Art 
Museum (this was the kick-off event for the 
Center), and the annual HOPE conference, this one 
organized by Roger Backhouse and Philippe 
Fontaine on “The Unsocial Social Science? 
Economics and the Neighboring Disciplines Since 
1945.” The world-class combined Triangle 
Libraries system has extensive holdings that are 
available to all Fellows through Duke's Perkins 
Library, which is located literally footsteps 
away from the Center. Fellows have workspaces 
assigned to them, either in the Center itself or 
in private library carrels located in the 
library. Finally, Duke is home to the Economists’ 
Papers Project, a collection which includes the 
papers of 8 Nobel laureates in economics, as well 
as such luminaries as Carl Menger, Oskar 
Morgenstern, Nicholas Geogescu-Roegen, Tibor 
Scitovsky, Arthur Burns, Don Patinkin, Paul 
Davidson, and many others, as well as the papers 
of the American Economic Association.

To support teaching, we encourage junior fellows 
to sit in on or assist us with the many courses 
we offer at Duke. These courses may also be taken 
by undergraduates or graduate students enrolled 
at two neighboring universities, UNC-Chapel Hill 
and N.C. State. We are also organizing a Summer 
Teaching Institute, to begin summer 2010, that 
will be a sort of “Boot Camp” on the history of 
thought, aimed at helping faculty who may not 
have had training in the field to be able to 
offer a course in it. For more information on the 
various initiatives of the Center, please visit 
our website at www.econ.duke.edu/CHOPE <http://www.econ.duke.edu/CHOPE>.

I hope that you will agree that the Center is an 
exciting new development, and that you might be 
willing to help us to accomplish our goals. So how might you help us?

1. First, if you have good undergraduate students 
with an interest in the history of economic 
thought who might be going on to graduate school 
in economics, please let them know about our 
program and let them know that they can take 
courses in the field at Duke if they enroll at 
Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, or NC State.

2. Next, if you know of graduate students who 
want to do research in the history of political 
economy and who might benefit from a year at 
Duke, either as they finish up their dissertation 
or as a post-doc, tell them about us.

3. If you have a colleague who might benefit from 
our Summer Teaching Institute, let them know about us.

4. Finally, if you have a semester research leave 
or a sabbatical year coming up and would like to 
explore the possibility of spending all or part 
of it here at Duke, send me an e-mail or give me 
a call ­ I’d be happy to discuss it with you.

We are excited about the prospects of building a 
community of like-minded scholars here at Duke. I 
appreciate any support that you might be able to 
give us to help us to reach our goals. Should you 
be attending the upcoming HES meetings in Denver, 
I will be there and will be happy to discuss with 
you any matters of interest relating to the Center.

My best regards,

Bruce Caldwell