Mary Bridges

Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy Postdoctoral Fellow

Biography

Mary Bridges (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is a historian of the twentieth-century United States, with an emphasis on the linkages between US foreign relations and business history. Her current project, “Branching Out: Banking, Credit, and the Globalizing US Economy, 1900s–1930s,” argues that US multinational banks provided a crucial infrastructure of both global capitalism and US empire in the early twentieth century. The project explores the changing credit practices of overseas bankers, as US banks navigated new ways to profit from trade finance and their relationship to the US government. Prior to joining SAIS, she was a postdoctoral fellow with Yale University's International Security Studies program. She holds an MA from Yale in International Relations and a BA from Harvard, and she worked as a journalist prior to graduate school.