Dara Orenstein

Dara Orenstein is an associate professor of American Studies at George Washington University. Her research concerns the cultural history of capitalism, focusing on the United States in the long twentieth century. With an interest in unconventional forms of evidence, especially photography, she explores how processes of circulation—like warehousing, banking, and bookkeeping—have connected to processes of production, and thereby to the social relations of exploitation and expropriation. She grew up in Modesto, CA, and now lives in Takoma Park, MD. She earned her BA in African American Studies from Harvard University (1996) and her PhD in American Studies from Yale University (2012). For several years between college and graduate school, she lived in New York City and worked on issues of mass incarceration. She has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She has recently published her first book, Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism (Chicago, 2019), a genealogy of export-processing zones in the United States. Her next book project explores the imperial culture of financialization epitomized by the World Trade Center (1973-2001) and NYC as a “global city.”