Casey Eilbert

Biography

Casey Eilbert is Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Center for Humanities. She is a historian of the modern United States specializing in the history of ideas, the history of the state, and the history of capitalism. Before joining the Center for Humanities, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Economy and Society at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in Modern American History, Reviews in American History, and popular venues including Time.

Eilbert earned her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University (2024), M.A. in History from Princeton (2020) and B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia (2017).

Current Projects

Eilbert’s current book project, Bureaucracy: An American History (under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press) addresses a subject Americans love to hate, tracing how the concept of bureaucracy developed in the modern United States. Looking to discourses in social science, politics, business, public administration, and popular culture, it explores how Americans’ ideas about bureaucracy changed over time and influenced the major political economic developments of the twentieth century. More than merely an organizational form, bureaucracy—a symbol of the instrumentality, impersonality, and rationality of the modern world—was a concept at the heart of Americans’ efforts to navigate tensions between self and society, organize and govern themselves democratically, and build fair and effective organizations in the public and private sectors. By tracing rhetoric about bureaucracy and its influence, the book reveals how a famously boring subject determined Americans’ horizons of political possibility and the trajectory of the modern United States.

Publications

“Architects of the Administrative State: Public Administration in the Twentieth Century,” Modern American History, 2026, 1-23.

“State of the Field: The Organizational Synthesis,” Reviews in American History 54 (March 2026): 98-116.