Two New HPE Initiatives

I’m very pleased to announce two new Historical Political Economy Initiatives.

First, Jared Rubin and I are very pleased to announce that we have signed a contract with Cambridge University Press to edit a new book series titled: HISTORICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY.

We are immediately seeking submissions! A few thoughts on what we are looking for:

In our view, books are for big narratives. We are not seeking narrow claims that can be causally identified with precision. Books give an author the space to make big claims and support them with an (over-)abundance of evidence. This is the type of thinking we want to foster.

Obviously, books in the series must have a historical element. We want books that take the history seriously and ask questions motivated by historical context … not questions that can be answered only because one has found a historical dataset. Questions and context matter!

HPE is a growing, interdisciplinary field. We want books across several fields, not just our own. We suspect that most books will come from political science and economics, but we really hope to attract books in history and historical sociology.

Our goal is to make this the *premier* book series for works of HPE. If you have an idea for a book, feel free to reach out to us! Our emails are: jrubin@chapman.edu and jajenkins@usc.edu. Thanks to Robert Dreesen at CUP for believing in the project and supporting it.

Second, I’m very pleased to announce the first annual **Historical Political Economy Conference** will be held at the University of Southern California on either Oct 18-19 or 19-20, 2024. It will be co-organized by Allison Spencer Hartnett and myself.

The Google form for participation (paper/discussant/attendee) is here. The deadline for paper proposals is May 1.

The plan right now is for the conference to be 1.5 days. We’ll have a number of paper slots in the 45-60 minute range, a PhD student component (probably “lightning presentations” of some sort), and maybe one plenary. I’d also like to have a session or two to discuss how to build and promote the field going forward.

The conference is a joint effort of my USC PIPE Collaborative and the USC Center on International Studies, with additional support provided by USC Dornsife, the USC Grad School, and USC POIR.

Some funding is available for travel and hotel accommodations. Our preference is to distribute these funds mainly to junior faculty and PhD students. We’d greatly appreciate if senior faculty could attend and cover their own expenses.

I’m happy to answer questions! And receive suggestions!

I should have funding to continue the conference at USC for a little while at least. At some point, it probably makes sense to rotate the conference, but I’d like to institutionalize it first … and get to a point where it can (partially?; fully?) self-fund through membership dues. But that’s downstream a bit! And something to talk about as a group at the conference.

Note: I’d like to thank Ali Cirone for her great work on the HPE Horizons conference last April. My hope is to build on what she did. In moving from a pre-MPSA (or pre-APSA) type conference to a standalone one, I’m hoping to broaden HPE’s appeal and bring in more non-political scientists.

So HPE now has a journal, an Oxford Handbook, a CUP book series, and an annual conference. Exciting!

And, finally, after MPSA, we’ll be ramping up Broadstreet once again. Stay tuned!