The UCL Americas 2021 Eleanor Roosevelt Lecture: Amy C. Offner on 'Sorting Out the Mixed Economy'

We are delighted to host Dr Amy C. Offner (Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania) as our guest to deliver the UCL Institute of the Americas 2021 Eleanor Roosevelt Lecture. She will be providing an overview of her book, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy takes readers through half a century of US and Colombian history, offering a transnational history of state formation and capitalist reconstruction since 1945, showing the influence of Latin American developmentalism on the formation of the US welfare state and revealing the mid-century origins of practices that are regarded today as hallmarks of neoliberalism.

Amy’s book won the First Monograph Prize from the Economic History Society; the Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Murdo J. MacLeod Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. It was also a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and received an honourable mention for the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. 

About the UCL Americas Eleanor Roosevelt Lecture series

The Eleanor Roosevelt lecture is intended as a celebration of Eleanor Roosevelt’s immense influence as First Lady, public communicator on New Deal issues, human rights campaigner, women’s rights advocate, civil rights promoter, and early UNO eminence.

The series focuses on any aspect of ER’s role and interest in her own lifetime and legacy-related issues in the post ER era. The first lecture in the series was delivered in 2013 by Susan-Mary Grant (Newcastle University), and over the years we have been honoured to host other distinguished guest lecturers: Tony Badger (Cambridge); Jeanne Theoharis (Brooklyn College); Doug Rossinow (Oslo), and the Rt Hon Keir Starmer, to name a few.