Pursuing a PhD degree

Research Areas: Geographical Political Economy; Historical Sociology; History of Capitalism; American Studies

Supervisor: Jamie Peck 

Degrees: BA, University of Sheffield (2015); MA, University of British Columbia (2017)

Research Statement: I am a political economist working at the intersection of uneven development, politics of money and finance, and the history of capitalism. My dissertation examines the making of 20^th-century American capitalism through the geographies of the Federal Reserve System. I take the multi-sited and multi-scalar nature of this institution—with its 12 regional Reserve Banks, in addition to the Board of Governors in Washington D.C.—as methodological entry points to operationalize theories of uneven development elaborated by critical geographers and others. Focusing on the monetary politics of the U.S. South, the dissertation brings together an array of cases to historicize the institutional, political, and intellectual processes through which the Federal Reserve came to construct and manage a continent-spanning “national economy” in the face of geographical difference. In bringing theories of uneven development formulated at the relative peripheries of capitalism “back” to its ostensible core, my work aims to deconstruct a widespread universalization of American capitalism evident among its boosters and critics alike. My research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Sweden-America Foundation, the Economic Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South. In 2021-2022 I was a Fox International Fellow at Yale University. 

Select publications:

Omstedt, M. (2021). Provincialising American capitalism: From universal instance to contingent case. Antipode, 53(4), 1206-1227.

Omstedt, M. (2020). Reading risk: The practices, limits and politics of municipal bond rating. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 52(3), 611-631.