Joe Wallace is a lawyer and PhD candidate working on the history of financial capitalism in the United States in the formative period between the Revolution and the Jacksonian Era. His dissertation focuses on financial entrepreneurs, particularly in the Middle Atlantic region, and their legal, social, political, economic, and cultural contexts.

By tracing the transitions of shipping merchants to investment bankers, lottery brokers to securities dealers, revolutionary speculators to insolvent debtors, educated critics of finance to financial journalists, and artisan producers to investors in democratic financial institutions, the dissertation uses Baltimore as a narrative setting with broader analytical implications for how historians should interpret finance as a contested and contingent ground in the first decades of American history.

In tracing the rise of financial capitalism in Balimore between the 1760s and 1840s, the dissertation is situated on a chronological and historiographical bridge that connects eighteenth-century port studies in the Atlantic tradition with the new history of capitalism's turn toward the nineteenth century.