We were delighted to host Dr Amy C. Offner (Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania) as our guest to deliver the UCL Institute of the Americas 2021 Eleanor Roosevelt Lecture on June 3, 2021. She provided an overview of her latest book, 'Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton University Press, 2019). It takes readers through half a century of US and Colombian history, offering a transnational history of state formation and capitalist reconstruction since 1945, showing the influence of Latin American developmentalism on the formation of the US welfare state and revealing the mid-century origins of practices that are regarded today as hallmarks of neoliberalism.

Amy's book won the First Monograph Prize from the Economic History Society; the Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Murdo J. MacLeod Prize from the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association. It was also a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and received an honourable mention for the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.