Mikael Omstedt

Mikael Omstedt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. As an interdisciplinary social scientist, he has a particular interest in the geographies of finance, theories of uneven development, and the history of American capitalism and state transformation. His dissertation research draws on economic geography, historical sociology, and economic history to examine the making of twentieth-century American capitalism as seen through the Federal Reserve System. Historicizing the relationship between geographical inequality and monetary politics over the long twentieth century, this research utilizes the multi-sited and multi-scalar nature of the Federal Reserve to interrogate the complex institutional structures, contested politics, and hard intellectual labor necessary for constructing and regulating a continent-spanning national economy. This research is supported by funding from multiple sources, including the Economic Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Sweden-America Foundation. He has been published in journals such as Antipode, Environment & Planning A, and Geoforum , and his previous work on the politics of municipal bond rating was recently covered by Harvard University’s Journalist’s Resource, a website that curates and summarizes high-quality research on newsworthy public policy topics.