Caitlin Zaloom

Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist, Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University, and a senior fellow at Penn Washington, where she codirects the Forum on Higher Education Affordability. A scholar of culture, economy, and finance, her book Out of the Pits (University of Chicago Press) analyzes the sweeping impact of technological changes in the financial trading system and explores how the reorga nization of exchange required transformations in the education and training of financial actors. Her interest in culture, economy, and education led to her most recent book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost (Princeton University Press), which shows how financial pressures to pay for college have redefined middle class identity in the United States. Zaloom is the author of many articles on intergenerational family life in the contemporary economy, including “Financialization and the Household,” with Deborah James in Annual Review of Anthropology, “The Human Geography of Care,” with Claire Growney and Laura Carstensen in Dædalus, and “The Broken Promise of Retirement,” in The New York Review of Books. She has also published articles on higher education in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Research in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She is currently the codirector of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research program on Innovation, Equity, and the Future of Prosperity as well as Chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Cultural Storytelling and Stewardship at the American Museum of Natural History.