Interview with Kaufman awardee Mirek Tobiáš Hošman;
Who is Mirek Tobiáš Hošman?
I am a Ph.D. candidate of a joint double degree program at University of Bologna (Italy) and Paris City University (France) in the field of History of International Political Economy. I am currently a fellow at the Cold War Archives Research (CWAR) Institute at the Wilson Center. In Fall 2023, I was a visiting fellow at the Department of History at Harvard University. I am pursuing international and multi-archival historical research combined with a global research outlook. I have accessed archives in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, participated in work and research stays in Italy, France, Estonia, Japan, and the United States, and presented my work at conferences and workshops in Europe, North America, and Latin America.
Mirek Tobiáš Hošman has been awarded a BHC-Henry Kaufman Financial History Research Fellowship.
What’s your project title and the main argument/research question?
I have been awarded the Henry Kaufman Financial History Research Fellowship for my PhD research project. In my research, I study the construction of economic knowledge at the World Bank in the 1960s, during the so-called Decade of Development. By relying on newly declassified, confidential, and previously untapped records from multiple archives, I aim to untangle the complexities of the rise of economists as policy advisors at the Bank as part of the larger process of the institutionalization of economics in post-World War II global institutional architecture. I also aim to analyze how economists transformed the financial and lending activities of the World Bank and, in the process, moved the institution from being a conservative investment bank to a more progressive development agency.
Have you already presented this research, and what do you want to accomplish as a Kaufman fellow?
I have presented parts of my research at various occasions (seminars, conferences, workshops) throughout the world in the last years. With the Kaufman Fellowship, I plan to consult two archival collections essential for my research: J. Burke Knapp’s collection at the Hoover Institution and Robert W. Oliver’s collection at the Caltech Archives.
Since when have you been a member of the BHC, and why do you attend and stay connected to it?
I became a member of the BHC in 2023, and so I am a new member of this community. I joined because the BHC offers a useful platform for exchanging ideas and engaging in debates with business historians on an important dimension of my research. It also helps me to better contextualize my work within a broader research agenda, which overlaps with the financial history, the history of financial institutions, the history of international lending, and many other topics explored by historians at the BHC.
Follow Mirek Tobiáš Hošman on X https://twitter.com/mthosman