In the 1970’s a student and a professor at UCSC began a conversation about the future of capitalism. Years later those conversations became a friendship, collaboration, and eventually took an institutional form in this Initative. Stephen Bruce and Prof. Robert Meister invite you to join in this exploration.
Stephen Bruce, Founder
Stephen Bruce
Stephen Bruce co-founded The Alcentra Group in 2001 through the acquisition of Imperial Credit Asset Management (ICAM) which he helped start in 1997. He was responsible for growing Alcentra’s US asset management business, including the origination and management of leveraged securities funds. Before Alcentra, Stephen was with a hedge fund that focused on distressed debt and senior secured bank loans.
Prior to joining the hedge fund in 1995, Stephen worked for Lehman Brothers in London. In that capacity, he was responsible for coordinating high yield loan credit reviews and due diligence and providing trading opportunities to Lehman Brothers’ U.S. bank loan investor base. Mr. Bruce started Lehman Brothers high yield loan desk in London in 1993 and began his career at Lehman Brothers in 1992 in New York as one of two traders hired to build a bank loan business within Lehman’s High Yield Bond Group.
Before joining Lehman, Stephen originated and was co-manager of a $225 million portfolio consisting of investments in leveraged buyout funds and venture capital funds for Imperial Corporation of America (“ICA”). Mr. Bruce began his career at ICA in September of 1987 as a financial analyst prior to initiating management of the fund portfolio in 1990.
Robert Meister, Director
Professor of Social and Political Thought in the Division of Social Sciences, History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
Dr. Robert Meister works at the intersection of jurisprudence, political economy, theology, and cultural theory. His early publications focus on American constitutional development (especially in the area of rights and regulation) and theories of the state implicit and explicit in the work of Marx and Hegel. Professor Meister’s most recent work pursues a critique of the discourse of human rights by paying particular attention to moments when states undergo significant regime change. Since 2008, his research has returned to issues of valuation and regulation, focusing on late twentieth-century theories that foreground the pricing of options.
An active critic of University of California privatization, Professor Meister has served ten years as President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations and for five years on the Academic Senate Budget and Planning committees of his campus. He teaches in the Politics, Anthropology, and History of Consciousness graduate programs at UCSC, as well as undergraduate courses on political theory, political theology and human rights. He was educated in Philosophy at Princeton and Oxford and in both Government and Law at Harvard. Professor Meister has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard Law School, Mellon Foundation and University of California Humanities Research Institute.
Bernie Richter, Associate Director
Bernie Richter completed his PhD at the University of California, Irvine in Comparative Literature with an emphasis in Critical Theory. His dissertation focuses on the intersection between seeing and violence in the work of Joseph Conrad, Primo Levi and W.G. Sebald. Along with Peter Dimock, he is the co-founding editor and co-founding publisher of The Rethinking Capitalism Newsletter.
Peter Dimock, Managing Editor
Peter Dimock has worked in book publishing for over twenty-five years, first at Random House and then as senior executive editor for history and political science at Columbia University Press. Authors he has worked with include Toni Morrison, Amartya Sen, Angela Davis, Eric Hobsbawm, Olivier Roy, Paul Kennedy, Robert Meister, and Prabhat Patnaik. He is the author of two novels, A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family (Dalkey Archive Press, 1998) and George Anderson: A Love Song in Imperial Time (Dalkey Archive Press, forthcoming Spring 2012). He lives in Brooklyn and earns his living as a freelance editor. He is at work on a third novel.
Benjamin James Lozano, Curricular Coordinator
Lecturer in Politics and Legal Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Benjamin Lozano teaches in the Politics & Legal Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. He offers the two undergraduate upper division courses for Rethinking Capitalism–the introductory lecture course, titled Market Crisis & the Future of Capitalism, and the research seminar, titled Materialism & Financial Markets. Benjamin’s most recent work involves the development of a novel research project that includes a theory of finance capitalism, titled speculative materialist political economy.
Paul Held, Associate Director (2009-2010)