Announcing Phenomenal World Books

A new publishing collaboration from Phenomenal World and the University of Chicago Press.

Phenomenal World Books is a new publishing endeavor that seeks to elevate the political-economic investigations necessary to understanding the social world. Aimed at cohering a resurgent disciplinary alliance of economics and history, and oriented toward the categories of political economy and critical social science, the series features single- and multi-author works from scholars all over the world, curated and commissioned by an editorial board of today’s leading voices in the field.

The decade since the 2008 financial crisis has seen a revival in critical economic literacy extending beyond the academy, and the growth of an international audience for works on political economy. However, the translation of this “mass intellect” into political and institutional form has lagged behind. 

Phenomenal World Books builds on current political economy discourses by focusing on the scholar-practitioner interface, and on historical analysis alongside contemporary practice.

Ours is a moment characterized by tectonic shifts within the global political economy—climate change and catastrophe, varieties of right-wing populism, increasing state intervention in markets, geopolitical transformations, private- and public-led decarbonization—whose urgency demands both careful analytic work and strategic action.

The series will bring together new and established generations of scholars in order to tackle the big questions of political economy: Why is the US dollar “hegemonic”? Why has global economic growth slowed? What is the role of planning in the green transition? How will South-South cooperation shape the political economy of decarbonization? The goal is to clarify and analyze the antecedents of this moment, and the dispensation to come.

Editorial Board

Mehrsa Baradaran + Melinda Cooper + Daniela Gabor + Destin Jenkins + Ndongo Samba Sylla + Adam Tooze

The series is seeking proposals for single- and multi-author books. Please write to Phenomenal World at editorial@jfiresearch.org with ideas and questions.

View the announcement on Phenomenal World.

View as a PDF.

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