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Dennison headshot 2022
Office: 225A Baxter Hall (77)
Mail Code: MC 101-40
Phone: 626-395-1742
Email: [email protected]
Assistant to the Chair:
Name: Gail L. Nash
Email: [email protected]
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HSS Home  /  People  /  Tracy Dennison

Tracy Dennison

Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Social Science History; Ronald and Maxine Linde Leadership Chair, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
B.A., Bucknell University, 1992; M.Phil., University of Oxford, 1999; Ph.D., University of Cambridge, 2004. Assistant Professor, Caltech, 2006-09; Associate Professor, 2009-11; Professor, 2011-2022; Wasserman Professor, 2022-; Division Chair, 2022-; Linde Leadership Chair, 2022-.
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Profile

Tracy Dennison studies institutions and their effects on long-term growth and development. She is especially interested in the roots of economic divergence between east and west Europe, and uses serfdom as a lens through which to examine institutional change over time. Dennison is interested in how specific societies worked in the past – how societal rules and norms affected human behavior and how and why this varied over space and time.

Dennison's research to date has focused on these questions at the micro level, using local sources to investigate the ways that pre-modern entities like states, landlords, communities, and households influenced the economic, social, and demographic behavior of people in their everyday lives. In particular, she has studied estate policies and practices in imperial Russia, and the way that quasi-formal legal systems established by some wealthy landlords made it possible for their serfs to conduct property and credit transactions despite their ambiguous legal status. This was the subject of her 2011 book, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge University Press), in which she argued that these micro-level practices had significant implications for the longer-term economic development of Russia.

In her current project, Dennison is investigating these questions from a top-down perspective rather than the bottom-up approach taken previously. Comparing the abolition of serfdom in Prussia and in Russia, this research explores larger questions of political economy and state capacity and their implications for institutions and institutional change. How did the institutional structure of serfdom in central Europe differ from that in Russia and how did these differences matter to the process and outcomes of reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

Dennison has also published on institutions and demographic behavior, comparative systems of serfdom, and on the importance of history and historical context in social science research. She is a regular contributor to Broadstreet Blog, an interdisciplinary forum which aims to bring research in historical political economy to a wider audience.

Research Summary
Historical Political Economy; Social Science History; Long Run Growth and Development; Institutions; Serfdom; Demographic History; Russia; Eastern and Central Europe
Selected Awards
  • Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship (LMU Munich 2015-17)
  • HSS Brass Division Award for Excellence in Teaching (2016)
  • Henry A. Wallace Prize for Best Book in Non-U.S. Agricultural History (2012)
  • W. Bruce Lincoln Prize for Best First Monograph (2012)
  • Economic History Society Prize for Best First Monograph (2012)
  • NSF award for Imperial Russian Incomes Project (2010-11), as part of the Global Price and Income History Group (NSF: SES-0922531)

Featured News

A Reciprocal Model of Learning
October 05, 2022
Historian Tracy Dennison reflects on how her research influenced the development of an ever-evolving class on Russia and how classroom experiences have impacted her work.
Tracy Dennison Begins Tenure as Chair of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
October 04, 2022
Dennison, a social-science historian, succeeds Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (PhD '88), who has overseen the division for eight years.
Tracy Dennison Named Chair of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
June 22, 2022
Dennison, a social-science historian, will succeed Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (PhD '88), who has overseen the division for eight years.
Read more news   >

Selected Publications

  • Dennison, Tracy (2021) Context is Everything: The Problem of History in Quantitative Social Science. Journal of Historical Political Economy; Vol. 1: No. 1, pp 105-126.
  • Dennison, Tracy (2021) Institutions and Material Conditions: The Problem of History in Piketty's Capital and Ideology. Œconomia (11-1). pp. 161-170.
  • Dennison, Tracy and Klein, Alex (2021). The Socialist Experiment and Beyond: The Economic Development of Eastern Europe. In S. Broadberry & K. Fukao (Eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World (The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World, pp. 74-99). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Dennison, Tracy (2020) Overcoming Institutional Inertia: Serfdom, the State and Agrarian Reform in Prussia and Russia. In: A History of the European Restorations - Volume Two: Culture, Society and Religion. International Library of Historical Studies. Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp. 188-202.
  • Dennison, Tracy and Ogilvie, Sheilagh (2016) Institutions, Demography, and Economic Growth. Journal of Economic History, 76 (1). pp. 205-217.
  • Dennison, Tracy and Ogilvie, Sheilagh (2014) Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth? Journal of Economic History, 74 (3). pp. 651-693.
  • Dennison, Tracy (2013) Contract enforcement in Russian serf society, 1750-1860. Economic History Review, 66 (3). pp. 715-732.
  • Dennison, Tracy and Nafziger, Steven (2012) Living Standards in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 43 (3). pp. 397-441.
  • Dennison, Tracy (2011). The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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