Madeleine Baker
Madeleine Baker currently College Fellow in the History of Science department at Harvard University and oversee the senior thesis program for undergraduates. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in May 2022, and my dissertation won the 2023 Leo P. Ribuffo Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History as well as the 2024 Forum for History of Human Science Biennial Dissertation Prize.
Her research explores the intellectual and cultural life of capitalism in the modern United States. Her book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (Harvard University Press, 2025), examines how social scientists and management intellectuals reshaped the American work ethic during the turbulence of industrialization and deindustrialization. Make Your Own Job received the 2026 Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians and was shortlisted for the 2026 Cheiron Book Prize.
In addition to her academic work, she has written articles on labor, politics, and American history for publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, n+1, The Nation, and more; she is a contributing writer at Jewish Currents. She is also Senior Editor at The Drift, where she has been involved since its inception in 2020.
