Center for Economic History receives $2.5 million grant from Menard family

Northwestern University’s Center for Economic History in the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences has received a $2.5 million grant from the Menard family.

The grant will fund a faculty position for an economic historian, who will serve as associate director of the center. The grant also will fund two postdoctoral fellowships, faculty and student research, and administrative support.

“The Menard grant will solidify Northwestern University’s position as the premier center for economic history worldwide,” said Joel Mokyr, co-director of the center, the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, and professor of economics and history at Northwestern.

“Economic history by its very nature is an interdisciplinary area, straddling not just history and economics, but also politics, engineering and even medicine,” Mokyr said. “It is above all social science at its very best, combining historical understanding, formal quantitative methods, the burgeoning use of Big Data and cutting-edge methods of collecting and analyzing data, including machine learning and optical character recognition. Thanks to the Menard family’s generosity, the center will be able to fund ambitious and innovative projects that shed light on many tantalizing and unresolved questions in economic history that, until now, were not exposed to rigorous and data-intensive analysis.”

“I deeply appreciate this investment of the Menard family in the research and teaching of economic history at Northwestern,” said Adrian Randolph, dean of the Weinberg College. “This support honors the extraordinary scholarship and leadership of Professor Mokyr and permits us to continue building one of the strongest programs in economic history in the world.”

Learn more about this grant in the story Northwestern Now story: Center for Economic History receives $2.5 million grant from Menard family