Deirdre McCloskey’s Chicago Chapter: Scholarship at UIC and Beyond

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s career has included a substantial Chicago chapter. From 2000 through 2015, she taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she held appointments spanning economics, history, English and communication. That combination reflected the breadth of her work: McCloskey has examined how economic and political ideas helped shape the modern world, while also writing about the ways people use language and argument.

Her connection to UIC is one part of a career that crosses academic disciplines and national borders. During her years at the Chicago university, she also taught as a visiting scholar in several countries. Her subjects included economic history at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, economics at the University of the Free State in South Africa and philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

McCloskey’s academic work has earned broad recognition. She has received 12 honorary doctorates and has led two professional organizations: the Social Science History Association and the Economic History Association. She also helped found the Cliometrics Society, an organization associated with the use of quantitative methods in economic history. Her distinctions include fellowships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Study.

For a Chicago audience, McCloskey’s UIC years offer a useful lens on the city’s role in her public intellectual life. Her teaching there was not limited to a single department or method. Instead, her appointments placed economic analysis alongside historical research, communication and the study of language. That mix is especially relevant to readers interested in how scholarship can connect fields that are often kept separate.

McCloskey has also written and researched topics including the misuse of statistical significance, part of a broader interest in how evidence is interpreted and communicated. Since 2023, she has been a distinguished scholar and the holder of the Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Her current institutional affiliation is outside Chicago, but her 15 years at UIC remain a significant part of the biography of an academic whose work has moved between economics, history, philosophy and rhetoric.

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Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://web.archive.org/web/20080607044650/http://deirdremccloskey.org/pubs/gender/dee.php - https://viaf.org/viaf/41854197 - https://www.aeåaweb.org/jel/contents/mar1996.php#AN0385083 - https://books.google.com/books?id=6RAJq7enhoAC&pg=PA350 - https://books.google.com/books?id=MaCciKWcDIAC&pg=PA302 - https://web.archive.org/web/20150411204451/http://poroi.grad.uiowa.edu/board-of-directors Image rights Original illustrative artwork created from story keywords. It is illustrative, not a documentary photograph.