Valerie Forman

Valerie Forman's research and teaching interests are at the intersection of literature, economic history, and political theory. Her first book, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), explores the relationship between innovations in the theatre and new economic practices necessary to the beginnings of global trade and even to capitalism. Her second book project, which turns to trade, slavery, and cultural relations in the Caribbean, is entitled Developing New Worlds: Property, Freedom, and Productivity in the Early Modern Caribbean.

Valerie Forman is Associate Professor at the Gallatin School at New York University. Her research has focused on theories and practices of labor, trade, migration, slavery and capitalism in, through and around early modern literature and history. Her first book, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage, works to denaturalize capitalism by exploring the relationship between economic theories and practices necessary to the beginnings of the global economy and innovations in the theatre. In more recent years, her research as well as organizing and advocacy, have focused on the US southern border with Mexico, recent migrants to NYC, as well abolitionist practices, especially as they relate to immigration detention, borders and mutual aid.