Thomas A. Stapleford

Tom Stapleford studies the human sciences, especially economics, where his work intersects American political history and the history of capitalism. He also has strong interests in virtue ethics, historical epistemology (the joint historical and philosophical study of ways of reasoning), and historiography (how one writes history).

Stapleford is the author of The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics (Cambridge, 2009) and co-editor of Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program (Cambridge, 2011) and Science, Technology, and Virtues (Oxford, 2021). He is currently completing a book on the Ethics of Official Facts that uses virtue ethics to think about how to integrate expertise with democratic governance.

Stapleford has been awarded major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, the John Templeton Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and has served on the editorial board for Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, and was Associate Editor for Studies in the History & Philosophy of Science Part A.