HWS News
17 April 2019 • Faculty Endowed Professor Spotlight: William Waller
William Waller P'99, P'04, P'09, P'13, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics, is an expert on institutional economics and the ways in which the economy intersects with public policy.
Currently chair of the Economics Department and director of wine studies at HWS, Waller serves as editor of the Journal of Economic Issues (JEI), a scholarly publication focused on institutional economics that is produced by the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE). A longstanding member of AFEE, Waller has served as president, vice president and secretary/treasurer. He has also served on the JEI editorial board. The author of dozens of articles and book chapters, Waller has co-edited several books, most recently Cultural Economics and Theory: The Evolutionary Economics of David Hamilton.
"The endowed professorship has provided the means to fund research travel that has greatly enhanced my research productivity over the duration of the professorship," he says. "Of course, enhanced research always contributes to better teaching by insuring course materials are current and relevant."
Waller, who has been a member of the HWS faculty since 1982, holds a bachelor's and master's from Western Michigan University and a doctorate from the University of New Mexico. He is a past recipient of a Fulbright-Hayes grant to conduct research in Sri Lanka. In 2015, he received the Veblen-Commons Award, the highest honor awarded by the AFEE.
During the 2017-18 academic year, Waller served as the Helen Cam Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Girton College in the U.K., where he participated in the Cambridge Social Ontology Group and attended Cambridge Realist Workshops.