His work and teaching emphasizes U.S. intellectual history, political economy, and biography. He received his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1982. His publications include The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the 1920s (1985), “Policy History and the Sublime Immodesty of the Middle-Aged Professor,” The Journal of Policy History V. 9, No. 3 (1997), and “Mary van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation: Religion, Social Science, and the Ironies of Parasitic Modernity,” in Ellen Lagemann, ed., Philanthropic Foundations – New Scholarship, New Possibilities (1999).