Jake Sirota

I'm a PhD student in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. My research explores the intersection of religion, literature, finance, and colonial history.

I'm currently working on a dissertation which examines the development of financial ideas in the early novel, tracing how eighteenth-century fiction was shaped by—and in turn shaped—the theological and philosophical frameworks through which we understand value and time. Central to this project is the relationship between financial abstraction and racialization in the context of colonial enterprise, and how literary form registers that entanglement.