Caley Horan

Caley Horan is a historian of the twentieth-century United States interested in the social life of economic ideas. Her research and teaching focuses on business history and the history of capitalism, risk and uncertainty, and American culture in the post-1945 era.

Her first book, Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2021), won the 2022 Hagley Prize for best book in business history. Insurance Era examines the role of the insurance industry in shaping social, political, and economic life in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Horan is currently at work on a new project on the history of astrology and uncertainty in the modern US.

At MIT, Professor Horan teaches classes on modern US history, including American History Since 1865; Sexual and Gender Identities in the Modern US; The United States in the Nuclear Age; American Consumer Culture; and History of American Capitalism (co-taught with DUSP professor Jason Jackson). She also co-teaches a graduate-level course with STS professor William Derringer, titled “Risk, Fortune, and Futurity.”

Read an interview with Professor Horan about her research on private insurance in the United States.