Tuesday, November 12, 2024: Annual Clements Senior Fellow Lecture

What’s “Neo” about Neoliberalism? Texas and the Road to High Tech in the Long 1970s

6 PM lecture followed by Q&A
McCord Auditorium, Dallas Hall, 3225 University Blvd., SMU

Click here to register. 

Historians often view the 1970s and 1980s as a radical break from the previous decades, one where Reaganism and neoliberalism drastically shifted the nation rightward and reduced the role of the government and public institutions in the United States. Texas offers a different perspective, one that complicates this narrative due to an increasing willingness to use government and public institutions to enhance economic development during this era. The talk thus focuses on practices and policies that allow us to explore how capitalism is shaped on the ground and questions ideological frameworks that suggest massive turns toward privatization and the erasure of government during the late twentieth century.

Andrew M. Busch an associate professor of history at Coastal Carolina University and is this year's Clements Senior Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America. He is an interdisciplinary historian who studies cities, environmental planning, knowledge production, and political economy. He is also an oral historian. Busch received a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth Century Austin, Texas (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) and co-author of Republic of Barbecue: Stories beyond the Brisket (University of Texas Press, 2009). His book project which he will further during his year at the Clements Center, High Tech Texas: Public Institutions, Regional Economic Development, and the Myth of Free Markets, is under contract with the University of Texas Press.

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Free and open to the public.