Christine A. Desan

Christine A. Desan
Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law
Biography
Christine Desan teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory. She is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism, an interdisciplinary project that brings together classes, resources, research funds, and advising aimed at exploring that topic. With its co-director, Prof. Sven Beckert (History), she has taught the Program’s anchoring research seminar, the Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, since 2005. Desan was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study during the 2015-2016 academic year and at the Massachusetts Historical Society in the fall of 2016.
Desan’s research explores money as a legal and political project, one that configures the market it sets out to measure. Her approach aims to open economic orthodoxy to question, particularly insofar as it assumes money as a neutral instrument and markets as autonomous phenomena. She has recently published a book called Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is also the editor of Inside Money: Re-Theorizing Liquidity (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press), and co-editor with Sven Beckert of Capitalism in America: New Histories (2018). Her articles include "The Constitutional Approach to Money: Monetary Design and the Production of the Modern World," in Money Talks: Essays in Honor of Viviana Zelizer, Bandelj and Wherry, eds., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and “Strange New Music: The Monetary Composition Made by the Enlightenment Quartet,” forthcoming in Money in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury Press, 2019), available at Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3217621.
Desan is on the Board of the Institute for Global Law and Policy, is a faculty member of the Program on American Studies at Harvard University, and has served on the editorial board for the Law and History Review and as an advisory editor of Eighteenth Century Studies. In Brookline, MA, Desan served for 10 years on a town committee that researched and drafted legislation promoting campaign finance reform, and that supervised that reform once it was enacted.
Areas of Interest
- Constitutional Law: Constitutional History
- Constitutional Law: Monetary History
- International Law: International Monetary Systems
- Law and Economics: Comparative Institutional Design
- Legal Theory
- Legal Theory: Political Economy
Current Courses
- The Legal Architecture of Globalization: Money, Debt, and Development, Spring 2019
