Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre McCloskey


Distinguished Professor


Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, adjunct in classics and philosophy, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty-four books and some four hundred academic and popular articles on economic history, rhetoric, philosophy, statistical theory, economic theory, feminism, queer studies, liberalism, ethics, and law. She taught 1968–80 at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department during its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-marxoid, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man.