Caitlin Zaloom

Biography

Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist, Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a pioneering scholar of culture, economy, and finance. Her first book, Out of the Pits, analyzed the sweeping impact of technological changes in the financial trading system, and explored how the reorganization of exchange required transformations in the education and training of financial actors. Her interest in culture, economy, and education led to her most recent book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost (Princeton University Press), which shows how financial pressures to pay for college have redefined middle class identity in the United States. As a senior fellow at Penn Washington, she organizes a national network of scholars who advocate for higher education affordability at the federal, state, and university levels.

Zaloom is the author of many articles on intergenerational family life in the contemporary economy, including “Financialization and the Household,” with Deborah James in Annual Review of Anthropology, “The Human Geography of Care,” with Claire Growney and Laura Carstensen in Daedelus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and “The Broken Promise of Retirement,” in The New York Review of Books. She has also published influential articles on higher education in publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Institutions including the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Research in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford have supported her research. She is currently the co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research program on Innovation, Equity, and the Future of Prosperity as well as Chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Storytelling and Stewardship at the American Museum of Natural History.