Dr. Nicole Sackley

Professor Sackley is a historian of the United States in the World with emphasis on the Cold War era, the history of international development, and the role of Americans as transnational actors. She has published in Agricultural History, Diplomatic History, History & Technology, The Journal of Global History, and Modern Intellectual History as well as multiple edited collections. 

Her past research has examined how US social scientific categories and models of modernization—from “culture” and “economy” to “the village”—were  made on the ground in the ferment of transnational intellectual networks and postcolonial politics, particularly those of Nehru’s India.

Sackley is currently at work on two projects: Co-op Capitalism, a monograph about U.S. cooperatives and global development in the twentieth century, and “Mapping the Foundations,” a digital humanities project spatializing all international grants given by the Ford the Foundations since 1951.  “Co-op Capitalism” examines  an important but largely unknown history of Americans who debated the nature of US capitalism and furthered their own economic development dreams through international cooperative ventures in the second half of the 20th century. Americans were drawn into a world where governments and citizens navigated the Cold War’s ideological poles. From Swedish consumer coops to Israeli kibbutzim, Indian fertilizer plants and Nicaraguan coffee cooperatives, the cooperative appealed as a malleable “middle way,” neither corporate nor communist, that could be mobilized for competing agendas. While some US cooperators hailed “co-op” capitalism as a US export for the world, others saw in cooperatives blueprints to remake global capitalism and opportunities for international solidarity. “Co-op Capitalism” inserts new actors, new ideologies, new hopes, and new failures into the scholarly understanding of how Americans participated in international development and how development visions came home to shape US culture and society.