Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Director of Research in American History at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of more than ten books. He is currently the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, where he is working on a new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century. He now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Gerstle’s earliest interests lay in the history of labor and political economy. In 1989 he published both Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City and a co-edited book, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. His exploration of questions of immigration, race, and nationality culminated in the 2001 publication of the prizewinning American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, reissued with a new chapter on ‘Race and Nation in the Age of Obama’ in 2017. To answer questions about the American state that had long confounded him, Gerstle undertook a ten-year project that produced his most sweeping study, the prizewinning Liberty and Coercion: Paradoxes of American Government from the Founding to the Present (2015).

To make sense of the Brexit and Trump earthquakes of 2016, Gerstle returned to insights gained from his earliest work on the connections between economics and politics. The result was The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022). The book has been translated into multiple languages, made ‘Best Books’ lists in the US, UK, the Netherlands, and India, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year. An adapted excerpt from the book, incorporating new material on Trump 2.0, has just been published by Deseret News.

Gerstle has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, Dissent, the Nation, Unherd, Project Syndicate, and Die Zeit, among others. He has designed and narrated a four-part series on American democracy for BBC World Service. He has participated in scores of podcasts, most ambitiously with David Runciman and Helen Thompson at Talking Politics and, most recently, with David Runciman at Past, Present, Future.

He and Noam Maggor thank the Hewlett Foundation for the resources that have made this Beyond Neoliberalism conference possible.