Dr Mary Bridges

Mary Bridges is the 2025 United States Studies Centre — American Australian Association Fellow. She is a historian of the 20th-century United States. Her research investigates the linkages between US foreign relations and business history.

Mary's 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 infrastructure of both global capitalism and US empire in the early 20th century. The project explores the changing credit practices of overseas bankers, as US banks navigated new ways to profit from trade finance and their relationship to the US government.

She is currently an Ernest May Fellow Harvard University’s Belfer Center. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University's International Security Studies program and at Johns Hopkins SAIS. 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.