Robert E. Wright Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Robert E. Wright is the Nef Family Chair of Political Economy and founding director of the Thomas Willing Institute for the Study of Financial Markets, Institutions, and Regulations at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Previously, Dr. Wright taught at New York University’s Stern School of Business, the University of Virginia, Temple University, and elsewhere. He teaches courses on the history of capitalism, Native American economic history, and HBO’s The Wire, among other topics.
He is the author or co-author of fifteen books, including Wealth of Nations Rediscovered (2002); First Wall Street (2005);Financial Founding Fathers (2006); One Nation Under Debt (2008); Fubarnomics (2010); and Corporation Nation (2014). He is currently working on books about entrepreneurship in South Dakota and America’s fifty largest bank holding companies.
Dr. Wright is a board member of Historians Against Slavery, an NGO dedicated to using historical insights to help reduce the number of coerced laborers worldwide. He is also the editor of Cambridge University Press’s series Slavery Since Emancipation and was the founding editor of Pickering and Chatto’s Financial History monograph series. He is a member of the editorial board of Financial History, the magazine of the Museum of American Finance in New York.