Nic Johnson is a postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Law, Letters, Society program at the University of Chicago. He also regularly teaches in the Power, Identity, Resistance sequence in the Social Sciences Core, and his classes have been cross listed with history and economics.
His research interests are at the intersection of economic, intellectual, and political history, both in the twentieth century and in the longue durée. He is currently working on two projects that explore the relationship between state building, class formation, and theories of economic management. The first is his dissertation project, American Keynesianism, which examines how the rise and fall of the military-industrial complex in the middle of the twentieth century, and its replacement by the Wall Street-IMF-Federal Reserve complex in the late twentieth century, shaped and was shaped by Keynesian theories of capitalist stabilization, particularly at MIT. The second is a book about the long history of public liquidity, from the invention of sovereign debt in the high middle ages to central banking today. His work on Keynesian intellectuals has appeared in Modern Intellectual History and the Center for the History of Political Economy working paper series, and his work on the historical sociology of public debt has been featured by the New Left Review and the Jain Family Institute's Phenomenal World.
Prior to joining the Law, Letters, and Society program, Nic was a visiting fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University. He earned a PhD in History at the University of Chicago in 2024, and was a PhD candidate in Economics at the Johns Hopkins University, where he earned an MA in 2015.