Mary Bridges is a historian of the twentieth-century United States. Her research investigates the linkages between US global power and infrastructure. Her book Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (Princeton University Press, September 2024), argues that US multinational banks provided a crucial foundation for expanding both US strategic and commercial interests in the early twentieth century.

She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. She previously held fellowships at Harvard’s Belfer Center, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Yale University. She holds:

• a PhD in history from Vanderbilt,

• an MA from Yale in International Relations, and

• a BA from Harvard in history and science.

Prior to graduate school, she worked as a business reporter and editor. She can be reached at mary.bridges@vanderbilt.edu.