Sean H. Vanatta

Senior Lecturer in Financial History and Policy, University of Glasgow, Non-Resident Fellow, Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance, Princeton University

Financial history, Public policy and regulation, Consumer Credit, Banking, Legal History, financial regulation

Sean H. Vanatta is senior lecturer in financial history and policy at the University of Glasgow and a non-resident fellow at the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy & Finance at Princeton University. He is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Credit Cards and the Making of Modern Consumer Finance (Yale University Press, 2024) and, with Peter Conti-Brown, Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America (Princeton University Press, 2025). His work has also appeared in the Business History Review, Enterprise & Society, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics, Management & Organizational History, and the Review of Social Economy.

Service to the BHC

Investments Committee 2024 - 2027 [Chair 2026 - 2027]

Board of Trustees 2025 - 2027

Program Committee 2024 - 2025

Philip Scranton Best Article Prize Committee 2021 - 2024 [Chair 2022 - 2023]

Recent Conference Participation

2026 BHC Meeting: Presenter, "Fiduciary Duty, Shareholder Value, and Anti-Apartheid Activism among US Public Pension Funds"
2025 BHC meeting: Presenter, "“The Ascent of the Prudent Man: Trusteeship and the Legal Origins of Financialization”" Discussant, Banking and Oral History
2024 BHC Meeting: Presenter, "The Board does not Know of Any Specific Cases of Discrimination”: How Consumer Protection Trumped Antidiscrimination within the U.S. Bank Supervisory Agencies, 1965-1977" Chair, Social Entrepreneurship, Corporate Philanthropy, and Community Finance
2023 BHC Meeting: Presenter, "Reinventing Bank Supervision during the New Deal, 1933-1938" Discussant, Protect America Again
2023 BHC Meeting: Presenter, Roundtable Presentation Discussant, Protect America Again
2022 BHC Meeting : Presenter, "The Ascent of the Prudent Man: State Trust Rules and the Origins of Financialization" Chair, Selling States: International Investment as Business and Practice
2021 BHC Virtual Meeting: Presenter, "The Origins of Federal Bank Supervision and Supervisory Discretion, 1863-1875"
2020 BHC Meeting: Presenter, "The Fall of Fiscal Mutualism: New York State Public Employee Pensions and the State Origins of Financialization" Discussant, Making the World Safe For High Finance