Robert Wosnitzer studies financial cultures, investigating the ways financial practices and technical instruments circulate alongside the beliefs, values and rituals of the people working in finance. His current dissertation, “Desk, Firm, God, Country: The Speculative Ethic in an Age of Financialism” explores the social and cultural history of proprietary trading of credit instruments in US investment banks. He is a founding member, with Arjun Appadurai, of the Cultures of Finance Working Group at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, and the Leboff Family Fellow in Media, Culture and Communications at Steinhardt. He has contributed to journals including Journal of Cultural Economy and Rethinking Capitalism and has served as Assistant Editor to the journal Public Culture . Prior to joining NYU, Robert traded and placed debt instruments with institutional clients for over a decade at firms including Lehman Brothers and Wells Fargo Capital Markets.
