Michael Douma
Managing Director
Michael J. Douma is an associate professor and the managing director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. He received a Ph.D. in history from Florida State University in 2011 and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands. He is interested in interdisciplinary work, including the history of political economy and the philosophy of history. Most of his publications concern 19th century American history and the history of the Dutch around the world. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Journal of Early American History, American Studies, Civil War History, and the Law & History Review, among others places. He is the author or editor of nine books, including most recently The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Creative Historical Thinking (Routledge, 2018) and The Liberal Approach to the Past (Cato Institute, 2020). He regularly teaches courses for Georgetown University’s history department, including a course on the history of globalization in a global affairs program jointly run by the McDonough School of Business and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. He also teaches the Dutch language at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Virginia.
As managing director for GISME, Michael is responsible for organizing and managing all of the institute’s events. He is personally responsible for designing and running the Seminar on Ethics Across the Curriculum and the Symposium on Markets and Catholic Social Thought.
Work History
Alma Mater
Books

Creative Historical Thinking

What is Classical Liberal History?


How Dutch Americans stayed Dutch: An Historical Perspective on Ethnic Change

The Colonization of Freed African Americans in Suriname: Archival Sources relating to the U.S.-Dutch Negotiations, 1860-1866

Veneklasen Brick: A Family, a Company, and a Unique Nineteenth-Century Dutch Architectural Movement in Michigan
Publications
Estimating the Size of the Dutch-Speaking Slave Population of New York in the eighteenth Century

Dutch-Speaking Runaway Slaves in New York and New Jersey, 1730–1825

What the Hell is Inflation Anyway?

Book Review: New Light on the Old Colony: Plymouth, the Dutch Context of Toleration, and Patterns of Pilgrim Commemoration

News
The Venture Capitalist Approach to Being an Academic

“What the Hell is Inflation Anyway?”
