Susan V. Spellman

Susan V. Spellman is a historian specializing in American business, capitalism, and consumer culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Her forthcoming book Cornering the Market: Independent Grocers and Innovation in American Small Business, 1860-1940 (Oxford University Press), considers the ways in which small grocers–often portrayed as holdovers from a nostalgic past–were key agents of a “modernizing” impulse in American capitalism from the Civil War era to the New Deal.  Her work has appeared in Enterprise & Society, Immigrant Entrepreneurship, and the Journal of Popular Culture, and she is a recipient of the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship from the American Historical Association and Library of Congress.  Born and raised in Ohio, she worked as a grocery store cashier, produce department manager, stocker, and bagger before embarking on a career in higher education.  She is currently Associate Professor of History at Miami University.