After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Wennerlind was hired by Perry Mehrling to teach macroeconomics and the history of economic thought at Barnard College. During the four years he spent as a visiting assistant professor in the Barnard economics department, his research focused on David Hume’s political economy, leading to publications in journals such as Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and History of Political Economy. He also organized a conference on the topic that subsequently led to the publication of David Hume’s Political Economy.
In 2004, he was hired by the Barnard College history department to teach courses on the history of the political economy and economic history. Apart from co-editing a volume that seeks to rethink mercantilism, he has spent most of his time researching the political, social, scientific, and cultural context within which modern finance emerged in England during the turn of the eighteenth century. He discovered that, far from the Mengerian story that economists like to tell, a new political economy was required to conceive of the possibility of a generally circulating credit currency. In Casualties of Credit he shows how this new economic thinking was grounded in a set of philosophical ideas associated with the scientific revolution and a political theory informed by the development of a modern fiscal-military state.