Madeleine Dungy is a PhD student in history at Harvard University. She studies national and international commercial institutions in the early twentieth century.
Dungy's dissertation examines shifting conceptions of international commercial order in Europe during the decades surrounding the First World War. She focuses on four men who served as mediators between private business networks and public administration during this period. They each spent their careers in a dense web of institutions that pooled public and private organizational resources in order to support foreign trade. These “half-official” institutions – as they were called at the time – initially developed to support the rapid globalization of the pre-war Belle Époque and subsequently helped to manage the massive mobilization of economic resources from 1914 to 1918.
Each of the men she studies used their intermediary status to develop and promote increasingly ambitious schemes for international economic governance during this period. While these projects were rarely endorsed wholesale by national governments, they did gradually gain a substantial following among transnational coalitions of business leaders, public officials and experts. Focusing on specific individuals within shifting intellectual and associational networks will allow me to capture some of the more radical and speculative forms of institutional innovation that globalization, global war, and the interwar “spirit of Geneva” produced in the realm of trade policy.
Dungy graduated with a BA in History from the University of Wisconsin in 2009. She completed a MSt in Modern British and European History at the University of Oxford in 2011. Her master's thesis examined a League of Nations debt-relief program that targeted farmers in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1920s.
This information is accurate for the time period that the scholar is affiliated with CES.
