Madeleine Baker
Research Interests: 20th century US history; history of the social sciences; history of labor and management
Madeleine Baker is College Fellow in the History of Science Department and the director of the senior thesis program for the History & Science concentration. Her research examines the intellectual and cultural life of modern American capitalism, with an emphasis on the history of the human and social sciences and the politics of labor and class. Baker’s first book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard University Press, 2025), won the 2026 Merle Curti Intellectual History Prize from the Organization of American Historians and was named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker. Her writing on history, politics, and culture has appeared in Modern Intellectual History, History of the Human Sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, History of Political Economy, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and many other venues. She is Senior Editor of the acclaimed literary magazine The Drift.
Baker grew up in the Midwest and received her PhD from Harvard in 2022. Her dissertation received the 2023 Leo P. Ribuffo Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History as well as the 2024 Forum for History of Human Science Biennial Dissertation Prize. She is always delighted to speak with students, especially about LGBTQ+ life at Harvard, writing in and outside academia, science fiction, and baseball.
Selected Publications
Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. Harvard University Press, January 14, 2025.
“Job-Killing Regulation: Anti-Environmentalism, Deindustrialization, and Neoliberal Class Politics.” Accepted and forthcoming, Modern Intellectual History.
“The Productive Character: Cold War-Liberal Social Psychology from Totalitarianism to Entrepreneurship.” In Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency. Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes, eds. January 2026, Cambridge University Press (Military, War, and Society in Modern American History series).
“The History of Economics as Science Critique: Demystification and Its Limits.” In Joel Isaac and Philippe Fontaine, eds., Historians and Economic Ideas, 1950-2022, Annual Supplement to Volume 57, History of Political Economy, 2025.
“The Ultimate Think Tank: The Rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian.” History of the Human Sciences 35, nos. 3-4 (2022): 32-57.
“From Planning to Entrepreneurship: On the Political Economy of Scientific Pursuit.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 92 (2022): 27-35.
“The Rise of Entrepreneurial Management Theory in the United States.” Modern Intellectual History 20, no. 1 (March 2023, originally published online November 2, 2021): 195-219.
Email: m_baker@g.harvard.edu
Personal website: madeleineebaker.com