PhD ’16 Grad Finalist for Nevins Prize
Recent PhD graduate Elisabeth (Bitsy) Perlman has been chosen as a finalist for this year’s Allan Nevins Prize in American Economic History. The Prize is awarded annually by the Economic History Association on behalf of Columbia University Press for the best dissertation in U.S. or Canadian economic history completed during the previous year. The 2016 prize was awarded at the Economic History Association’s annual meeting in Boulder, Colorado in September 2016. Perlman’s dissertation is titled “Connecting the Periphery: Three Papers on the Developments Caused by Spreading Transportation and Information Networks in the Nineteenth Century United States.” It is comprised of 3 papers: “Dense Enough To Be Brilliant: Patents, Urbanization, and Transportation in Nineteenth Century America, Part 1: Patents per Capita and Spreading Transportation Networks”; “Dense Enough To Be Brilliant: Patents, Urbanization, and Transportation in Nineteenth Century America, Part 2: Investigating Changes in Information Absorption and Distribution using Automated Text Analysis”; and “Delivering the Vote: The Political Effect of Free Mail Delivery in Early Twentieth Century America.” The latter is with fellow BU graduate Steven Sprick Schuster, and is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic History. Perlman currently works as an Economist at the Center for Economic Studies of the US Census Bureau in Maryland.