Prof. Tracy K. Dennison, Ph.D.

Profile

Since May 2015 Prof. Tracy K. Dennison, Ph.D. is a Visting Fellow at the LMU Munich's Chair of Economic History held by Prof. Dr. Davide Cantoni. Prof. Dennison has been granted a Humboldt Research Fellowship. In July and August Prof Dennison is also collaborating with the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies.

Tracy K. Dennison is Professor of Social Science History at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena since 2011. Earlier she had been teaching there as Assistant and Associate Professor. Before 2006 she was a postdoctoral research fellow and a temporary lecturer in Russian history at University of Cambridge (U.K.), where she did her Ph.D.

She is interested in how society worked in the past and how societal rules affected the decisions of ordinary people. She investigates how premodern institutions such as states, communities, and corporative entities influenced economic, social, and demographic behavior. Her research has centered on the role of households, communities, and landlords in the Russian rural economy under serfdom. In particular, Dennison has studied the role of landlords' policies, especially the quasi-formal legal systems established by some wealthy landlords that made it possible for their serfs to conduct property and credit transactions despite their ambiguous legal status.

Fellowship

• Stipendiary Fellowship at LMU Munich, July − August 2015