About Me

My research focuses on the history of attempts to stabilize the capitalist business cycle, and the various constraints – political, social, intellectual, economic – that have prevented them from fully functioning. Reflecting my multidisciplinary background, I draw on and make contributions to the subfields of intellectual history, political economy, economic history, and historical sociology, using both archival and quantitative research methods.

This agenda divides between three projects. The first is my dissertation, which I am currently transforming into a book manuscript. It traces the evolution of American Keynesianism in the second half of the twentieth century. Both intellectually and in terms of pragmatic policymaking, there is a shift from an early focus on fiscal policy, driven by military spending in Korea and Vietnam, towards monetary and financial policies at the Federal Reserve and IMF at the end of the century.

The second is a book project about the long history of interest rates on sovereign debt. It frames the recent experiences with near-zero interest rates as the culmination of many centuries of capitalist development. I have already published an article-length version of this argument and am working on expanding it into a manuscript.

The third and final project fell out of my dissertation, as a long chapter that did not quite fit. It is an archival history of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), the largest corporation in the world in the 1930s and 1940s. Three out of five chapters of this book are already done. In my view, the RFC represents a lost alternative to both the fiscal-military and the monetary-financial methods for managing capitalist stabilization that dominated the postwar era. Understanding how it worked and why it disappeared will contribute to contemporary debates about so-called “post-neo-liberal” policymaking, made more urgent by the limits to monetary policy at the zero lower bound.

Nic Johnson

Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences, Law, Letters, and Society, University of Chicago (department page)

Education:

  • Ph.D. in History (with distinction), University of Chicago (2024)
    • Dissertation: American Keynesianism
    • Committee: Jonathan Levy (chair), Joel Isaac, James Sparrow
  • M.A. in Economics, Johns Hopkins University (2015)
  • B.A.s in Math, Statistics, and Economics, University of Minnesota, Morris (2013)

Research:

Teaching Experience:

  • Teaching Fellow, Twentieth Century Theories of Capitalism (Winter 2025)
  • Teaching Fellow, BA Thesis Seminar in Law, Letters Society (Fall 2024 & Winter 2025)
  • Teaching Fellow, History of central banking (Fall 2024)
  • Graduate Student Lectureship, Power, Identity, Resistance (Fall 2020)
  • TA, Power, Identity, Resistance (Winter & Spring, 2020)
  • TA, Early Modern World Economic History (Winter 2019)
  • Deans Teaching Fellowship, History of Economics (Spring 2017)
  • Lecturer, The Marginal Revolution (January-term course)
  • TA, Elements of Microeconomics, two years
  • TA, Economics of Discrimination (Spring 2016)
  • TA, Macroeconomic Theory I (graduate), two years
  • Lecturer, AP Macroeconomics and Microeconomics Community Courses

Awards and Scholarships:

  • Visiting Scholar, Center for the History of Political Economy, Duke University, 2022-3
  • Shapiro Fellowship at the University of Chicago, 2017 – 2022
  • T. Rowe Price Fellowship at Johns Hopkins 2013 – 2017
  • Chris Berg Outstanding Senior in Economics 2013, University of Minnesota
  • Scholar of the College 2013, University of Minnesota
  • Sun M. Kahng Scholarship for Economics 2013, University of Minnesota

Book Reviews:

Popular:

Service:

  • Workshop Coordinator, History and Theory of Capitalism Workshop, 2021-2
  • Council Member, History Graduate Student Association, 2020-1
  • Economics for Historians Summer Workshop, 2018
  • Class representative for Economics, Graduate Student Association, Johns Hopkins 2013-6

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