Edward Balleisen is Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. His research and writing explores the historical intersections among law, business, politics, and policy in the modern United States.  One key strand of his work explores evolving fault lines within American capitalism, like bankruptcy and business fraud.  A second line of research examines the origins, evolution, and impacts of the modern regulatory state.  He has pursued a number of collaborative projects with historians and other social scientists who study regulatory governance in industrialized and industrializing societies.

Balleisen’s most recent books are the sole authored Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff (Princeton University Press, 2017), which received the 2018 Ralph Gomory Prize from the Business History Conference, and the co-edited Policy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents, and Financial Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2017), with collaborators Lori Bennear, Kim Krawiec, and Jonathan Wiener.  He has also recently co-led a multi-year research team that probed the origins of the 2008 global financial crisis, focusing on the dynamics of sub-national residential mortgage market regulation in the US.  This team built an archive of oral histories with legislators, regulators, judges, community leaders, consumer lawyers, NGO heads, financial sector executives, and providers of financial services.

Since 2015, Balleisen has served as Duke’s Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, working with university-wide institutes and initiatives to foster collaborative, interdisciplinary research, teaching, and civic engagement.