Gustav Peebles is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University, after spending many years at The New School in New York City. While at The New School, he served twice as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and also led a research team that designed a new undergraduate program that addresses the multifaceted crisis in higher education in America today. With Dr. Emma Park, he served as Co-Principal Investigator for the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar, “Currency and Empire.” He is currently spearheading a Wenner-Gren Symposium—"The Price of Wealth”— with his colleagues Teresa Ghilarducci and Rick McGahey, a workshop designed to bring specific strands of economic and anthropological research together. 

His publications include a book entitled, The First and Last Bank, that has been hailed as “audacious” and “ingenious” by Kirkus Reviews. Co-created with interdisciplinary artist Ben Luzzatto, it proposes a carbon banking system, with accompanying currency, that could help pull carbon out of the sky and store it in safe vaults. Another book, academic articles, and popular articles, all track credit, debt, money, and the diverse struggles to regulate and manage these vital economic phenomena throughout human history. Most recently, he has been exploring digital currencies, including work on the Swedish Central Bank’s e-currency, as well as studies of offshore finance and its surprising connections to the 19th century debtors’ prison complex.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, and a BA from Dartmouth College. In his spare time, he nurtures an almost pathological interest in the surprising threads that bind together the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Walter Benjamin. He lives with his wife and children in Stockholm, Sweden. He can be emailed at gustav.peebles@socant.su.se and found on Twitter @gustavpeebles.