Courtesy Appointments
Carola Frydman
We are delighted to welcome Carola Frydman to the Department of History as a courtesy appointment. Professor Frydman is the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Finance and the Faculty Director of the John L. Ward Center for Family Enterprises at the Kellogg School of Management, as well as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. An expert on corporate finance and on American business and financial history,
her research has focused on the role of financial intermediaries for firm growth, both during normal times and during financial crises. She has also made important contributions to our understanding of the long-run evolution of executive compensation, the skills of managers, and corporate governance. Recent projects focus, among other topics, on assessing the rise of women in business, the long-run evolution of family enterprises in America, the disparate impact that inflation has had on households across the income distribution in the twentieth century, and on the role that less-regulated financial intermediaries have played on the development of the American economy.
Walker Hanlon
This past April 2, 2024, we were deeply appreciative to hear a talk on "Besant, Bradlaugh, and the British Fertility Transition” by W. Walker Hanlon in Harris Hall to mark his new courtesy appointment to the History faculty. Professor Hanlon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and codirector of the Center for Economic History at Northwestern. His research focuses on understanding how economies evolve over the long run using novel historical data, with a specific focus on Britain and the broader North Atlantic economy from the late 18th century to the First World War. He is particularly interested in questions related to technological progress, urbanization, demography, international trade, and the environment. His book The Laissez-Faire Experiment: Why Britain Embraced and Then Abandoned Small Government, 1800-1914, on British government during the long nineteenth century, will appear later this year with Princeton University Press.
Emily Kadens
We are honored to welcome to the Department of History as a courtesy appointment Emily Kadens, a legal historian who is Vice Dean as well as Edna B. and Ednyfed H. Williams Memorial Professor at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Professor Kadens has a particular focus on the medieval and early modern history of commercial law and practice. An expert on early modern English equity court archives, she is currently using previously unexamined files from these courts to write a groundbreaking book on the history of commercial cheating in 16th- and early 17h-century England. She has also written extensively on how custom does—or does not—function as law, the concept of the medieval law merchant, and the early history of English bankruptcy. Another current project involves working with a neural net platform developed in Europe to build an AI model that can automatically transcribe 16th- and early 17th-century English secretary hand with a high degree of accuracy. The goal is to make transcriptions of equity court material available in a searchable online repository.