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 at my personal website (<a href="https://www.andrew-seal.com/">https://www.andrew-seal.com/</a>).
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: <a href="https://s-usih.org/author/andrew-seal/">https://s-usih.org/author/andre…;.
Courses Taught
- ECON 501: Business and Economic History
- ECON 625: Economic History of the US
- HONR 799H: Honors Thesis Completion
- PAUL 792: Honors Seminar
Research Interests
- American History
- American literature
- American studies
- Civil/Human Rights
- Digital humanities
- Economic History
- History of Economics
- History of world capitalism
- Intellectual History
- Modern American Intellectual History
- Political History
- Political Theory
- Political thought
- Race
Selected Publications
Seal, A. (2021). “The Vanished Power of the Usual Reign”: Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace, and the Struggle for Hegemony in History. The American Historical Review, 126(2), 655-669. doi:10.1093/ahr/rhab194
Seal, A. (2021). Cleveland's Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and Midwestern Racial Liberalism. In A. Seal, J. Lauck, J. Hogan, P. V. Murphy, & G. Whitney (Eds.), The Sower and the Seer: Perspectives on the Intellectual History of the American Midwest (pp. 416 pages). Madison, Wisconsin: Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Retrieved from https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS15605
Seal, A. (2021). Quinn Slobodian. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 400 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-97952-9, $35.00 (cloth).. Enterprise & Society, 22(1), 294-296. doi:10.1017/eso.2020.12
Seal, A. (2021). The Sower and the Seer: Perspectives on the Intellectual History of the American Midwest. A. Seal, J. Lauck, J. Hogan, P. V. Murphy, & G. Whitney (Eds.), Madison, Wisconsin: Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Retrieved from https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS15605
Seal, A. (2019). Marc-William Palen. The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xxxviii + 295 pp. ISBN-13 978-1-107-10912-4, $99.00 (cloth); 978-1-107-52133-9, $37.99 (paper).. Enterprise & Society, 20(2), 523-525. doi:10.1017/eso.2018.50
Seal, A. (2017). The Regrowth of American Thought. Middle West Review, 3(2), 1-19. doi:10.1353/mwr.2017.0000
Seal, A. (2016). Freedom from Abstraction. Dissent, 63(4), 145-149. doi:10.1353/dss.2016.0087
