D'Maris Coffman's Homepage

Welcome to yet another relic of the cyber-crazed nineties - the vanity homepage. Complete with a recent photo, no less. If this were a proper twenty-first century homepage, it would offer a blog with suitably wearisome confessions about colleagues, ex-colleagues, parents & partners, of the sort traditionally directed elsewhere. Happily, that seems bad for business, even in Anglophone academia. So instead, here's a plug for my work.

I graduated in May 2008 with my Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. Contrary to the usual fashion (even among financial historians), I did my undergraduate training at The Wharton School. In October, I started my three-year appointment as the Mary Bateson Research Fellow at Newnham College of the University of Cambridge. I work on early modern Britain, with an emphasis on late Stuart state formation, Treasury reform and policy, the relationship between taxation and political culture, and the politics of representations of cultural trauma in the early modern period. At the moment, I divide my time between working on my dissertation monograph (The Fiscal Revolution of the Interregnum: Excise Taxation in the British Isles) and organising a conference with a colleague, Dr Anne Murphy, entitled 'Questioning "Credible Commitment": Re-Thinking the Glorious Revolution and the Rise of Financial Capitalism'. Dr Murphy and I have just taken over management of the European State Finance Database from the University of Leicester. We will unveil the re-developed site at the conference. Further projects involve a follow-on study of the Restoration Excise and a rather more ambitious investigation of the origins of claims about 'transparency' in public accounting and the collection and consumption of revenue statistics by the 17th and 18th-century British states. The unlikely prologue to that story is forthcoming as the final essay ('The earl of Southampton and the lessons of Interregnum public finance') in Jason McElligott and David Smith's collection, Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum.

During the 2007-08 academic year, I taught two courses per term at Penn as an instructor, which is the humblest rank of non-standing faculty. That fall, I gave an undergraduate seminar (History 201 - Taxation and Revolution in Early Modern Europe) on the political economy of taxation and the rise of the fiscal state. I also taught History 002: Europe in a Wider World from 1500 in the College of Liberal and Professional Studies. In the spring, I gave two undergraduate seminars: History 202: Economic Thought from Smith to Marx for my department and History 201: Manias, Bubbles, and Market Failures for LPS. I am reprising the latter as Bubbles, Manias, and Market Failures from Tulips to Subprime in Penn's Summer Session II in July 2009. This is very similar to the working title for a trade book: Bubbles, Manias, and Market Failures: Financial Instability from Tulips to Subprime. In it, I investigate the early modern origins of the curious reflex of some economists, many economic historians, and most financial commentators to resort to psychological metaphors when confronted with the collapse of asset-price bubbles and to use analogies to medicine to assess the risks to the wider economy. As esoteric cocktail chatter, this rhetorical move is usually good value. When permitted to substitute for serious analysis, the result is ineffective public policy and a steady and persistent impoverishment of economic thought. Rather than serving as catalysts for more robust theories of financial markets, 'irrational' asset-price bubbles have become the exception that proves the rule of (crudely) 'rational and efficient' markets. Both those who would build on mainstream economics and those who would critique it would do well to extricate themselves from sterile discursive conventions. Predictably these lazy comparisons have not done the reputation of psychological medicine much good either.