Prof. Michael Zakim is a social and cultural historian whose scholarship focuses on the invention of the modern economy. He is the author of Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic; Accounting for Capitalism: The World the Clerk Made; and of the forthcoming Paper: A Global History. He has also edited a collection of essays, Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, as well as two special issues of the Israeli historical quarterly, Zmanim, respectively devoted to the history of the body and the history of privacy. He is currently writing a book about the invention of photography.
Zakim is a member of the Department of History at Tel Aviv University and is affiliated with the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at the Tel Aviv University School of Law. In 2014-15 he was a visiting professor of history at Harvard University. He also serves as a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians. Zakim graduated with a B.Mus. and a B.A. from Oberlin College and received his PhD from Columbia University, where his dissertation was awarded the Bancroft Prize.
