Economics Faculty

BA, Earlham College (economics and peace/global studies).  PhD, University of Massachusetts-Amherst (political economy). Taught economics and women’s/gender studies (1985-2010) at SUNY-Purchase, where she  received several awards for her teaching: the four-time recipient of the Students’ Union Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Letters and Sciences, the first recipient of the President’s Award for Innovative Pedagogy, and, in 1992, the recipient of the state-wide SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished College Teaching. She has also taught economics, labor history, and public policy as a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College. Dr. Christensen’s research focuses on the intersection of economics with public policy issues, with a particular emphasis on issues of race, gender, class, and labor; e.g., the experiences of low-income women in the AIDS crisis, the politics of welfare “reform,” the “gendered” nature of the current recession, and the impact of our campaign finance system on public policy. SLC, 2008–

BS, MEng, Cornell University. MA, PhD (Honors), The New School for Social Research. Current interests include the study of industrial competition, the political economy of the developmental welfare state, the determinants of business taxes, and the study of Schumpeter’s analysis of the tax state. SLC, 2000–

BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, Cambridge University. MBA, Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Executive in the Internet infrastructure industry as senior marketing officer of Cisco Systems. Founder of Astia, a business accelerator for women technology entrepreneurs. Founding chair of the board of Acumen Fund, a social venture fund investing in enterprises developing affordable goods and services for the poor in India, Pakistan, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Board member of BRAC and PolicyLink. Member of the Advisory Boards of Duke University Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, Global Philanthropy Forum, and Acumen Fund. Current interests include the power and limits of social entrepreneurship to achieve sustainable change—and teaching. SLC, 2012-

BA, PhD, University of California-Berkeley. Special interests include economics of gender, race, and class; feminist economics; political economics of the environment; the history of economic thought; and macroeconomics. Author of articles in Feminist Studies, Review of Radical Political Economics, Industrial Relations, Feminist Economics, and others. Co-author of Living Wages, Equal Wages: Gender and Labor Market Policies in the United States (Routledge, 2002). SLC, 1990–