Michael Zakim teaches history at Tel Aviv University. His scholarship focuses on the invention of the modern economy as both a cultural and material event. He is the author of Ready-Made Democracy (a political history of men's dress), Accounting for Capitalism (an epistemology of the market), and Paper: A Global History (forthcoming, on the knowledge/power nexus). He has also edited a collection of essays, Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, two special issues of the Israeli historical quarterly, Zmanim, respectively devoted to the history of the body and the history of privacy, and the new Hebrew translation of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. For several years, Michael also co-directed a joint seminar for Israeli and Palestinian university students organized around the theme of American democracy.