Carolyn is Assistant Professor in International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. Trained in modern world history (Princeton, 2010), her work approaches the dynamics of global capitalism since 1850 through the lenses of intellectual and cultural history. In particular, she is interested in the ways that individuals and institutions have responded to, made sense of, and then influenced the bundle of interconnected phenomena collated under the term ‘globalisation’.
Carolyn’s first book, Global Flesh and Spirit: The Information Age as seen from the League of Nations, 1918-1939 (forthcoming), situates the rise and fall of the world’s first intergovernmental organisation within the riptides of a global modernity where markets and societies became entangled with information systems. Her second project will revisit the “Interwar Crisis” by dissecting how the discipline of history (in particular the Annales School) and the newly emerging field of macroeconomics parted ways over questions of time frame, geographical boundaries and the proper relation of intellectual inquiry to politics. Above all, it will shed light on how disciplinary divergences occurred as intellectuals and policy makers tried to make sense of political upheaval and a crisis-bound global capitalism between the First and Second World Wars.