20th Anniversary Speakers

D'Maris Coffman

University of Cambridge

Speaker at Frankfurt Public Policy Symposium
 

D'Maris Coffman received her MA and PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania and her BSc in Economics from the Wharton School. She is currently the Mary Bateson Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she is revising her dissertation, entitled The Fiscal Revolution of the Interregnum: Excise Taxation in the British Isles, 1643-1683, for publication as a monograph. She is also working on a second book entitled Bubbles, Manias, and Market Failures: Financial Instability from Tulips to Subprime, which investigates how and when ‘asset-priced bubbles’ have acquired the status of the ‘exception that proves the rule’ of ‘rational and efficient markets.’ She argues for a more robust theory of financial markets that sees these events as an integral to their functioning. Her audience is both other academics and the educated public. Future research projects involve a study of the origins of claims about ‘transparency’ in public accounting and on the collection and consumption of revenue statistics by the seventeenth and eighteenth-century British states. As a lecturer at Penn in 2007-2008, she recently taught courses in early modern public finance, economic thought, and the development of financial capitalism.