Anders Bright received his PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2025. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of economic history and the cultural history of capitalism and is motivated by an interest in how financial capitalism structured access to economic opportunity in early America. His dissertation—Luck’s Republic: Lotteries, Class, and the Emergence of American Financial Capitalism (1760-1860)— provides a bottom-up account of the United States’s transition to financial capitalism, told through the lens of its most important yet forgotten financial institution: the lottery.

He can be reached at: andersbr@sas.upenn.edu