Current Research Areas: Economic History, History of Economic Thought, Liberalism, Technocracy, Cultural History, Intellectual History, Art and Politics, 20th Century US, Latin America
Lauren Anderson is a first-year doctoral student with interests in the history of economic reasoning, scientism, and governance. Her current research focuses on technocracy – the idea that social and political problems can be subject to the same scrutiny as phenomena in natural science – and its place within 20th century discourse on social scientific knowledge and the liberal state. As an intellectual and cultural historian, Lauren writes history that explains how the ideas behind technocracy have entered into public life and produce cultural norms about the authority of social science. Her broad areas of research include the history of the regulatory state, the history of the economics discipline, and the corporatization of modern America.
Previously, Lauren worked on projects related to art, aesthetics, and civic life. As an undergraduate student Lauren wrote a senior honors thesis reconstructing how interwar Mexican mural artists expressed polemic ideas on modernity, industrialization, and scientific progress through their public art. She has also worked on projects about cartography’s visualization of modern science. Prior to entering HASTS, Lauren lived in New York City where she worked as a fixed income analyst and later as a policy associate in the supervision group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Lauren completed her bachelor’s degree in Social Studies at Harvard College and holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Oxford.