​Guy Alchon’s work and teaching emphasizes U.S. intellectual history, political economy, and biography. He received his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1982. His publications include The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism, Social Science, and the State in the 1920s (1985), “Policy History and the Sublime Immodesty of the Middle-Aged Professor,” The Journal of Policy History V. 9, No. 3 (1997), and “Mary van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation: Religion, Social Science, and the Ironies of Parasitic Modernity,” in Ellen Lagemann, ed., Philanthropic Foundations – New Scholarship, New Possibilities (1999).

Professor Alchon next would turn exclusively to the teaching of undergraduate students, helping them to attain an adult competence, while guiding them toward a worldview and moral imagination of their own.