Francis Russo is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an historian of early and nineteenth-century North American history, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. His dissertation is a history of utopian socialism in early North America that traces the movement’s aspirations, failures, and transfigurations from the era of colonization to the nineteenth century. Most broadly, Francis is interested in the deep history of reform struggles before the Civil War that provide the crucial context for understanding the triumph and tragedy of Reconstruction after it, as well as the long historical legacy of utopian socialism in the reform tradition and philosophy of American Pragmatism, exemplified in the works of William James, W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Addams, and John Dewey. Francis' research has been supported by the John Carter Brown Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, University of Michigan Library, Economic History Association, History of Economics Society, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, among others. Francis earned a B.A. from Trinity College, and an M.A./M.Sc. from the International and World History dual-degree program at Columbia University and the London School of Economics.
Project: “Utopian Dreams at the End of Early America: Social Reformers and Their Worlds, 1663-1860”