About the Presenter
Laura Clerx is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston College. Her research project explores the relationship between scientific and economic activity in the lives of early Americans seeking to expand national markets into the North American continent’s interior.
She argues that changes to economic practice in the early republic which transformed early national Americans’ relationship to property in land and material goods and laid the groundwork for an increasingly capitalist society, also shaped the way that they studied and understood the scientific properties of the natural world.
Recipient of the James C. Rees Entrepreneurship Fellowship