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Matt Seybold talks about the development of economics as a discourse inside and outside the academy, its success in making itself felt to be the only discourse that can talk about resource management and distribution, and its many complicities with capitalism. The conversation ranges from the origins of economics in the concept of household management, to the possibilities of a utopian economics in the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, where he is also resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, editor of MarkTwainStudies.org, and host of The American Vandal Podcast. He is co-editor, with Michelle Chihara, of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018) and, with Gordon Hutner, of a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & American Literary Studies in the New Gilded Age.” Other recent publications can be found in Aeon, American Studies, Henry James Review, Leviathan, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Mark Twain Annual.

Image: “New York Harbor from Brooklyn Bridge” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 – 1945.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Technical Difficulty Lullaby (Pigeon Song)’ by Monplaisir

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