S. Abu Turab Rizvi

Abu Rizvi joined Lafayette College as provost in 2015 and has been teaching in the economics department since 2020. Prior to joining Lafayette, he was an economics professor, department chair, and dean of the honors college at the University of Vermont.

Professor Rizvi teaches courses on making change democratically, markets and democracy, justice and economics, and principles of economics. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education he taught a course on educational practices for democratic engagement, and at the University of Vermont he taught seminars on ethics and ways of knowing and courses on welfare and well-being, game theory, microeconomics, and statistical methods.

His research focuses on democracy and higher education; the relation of social justice to economics; poverty, preference, and well-being; and the history and method of economic theory. He is the author (with David P. Levine) of Poverty, Wealth, and Freedom: Political Economy and the Moral Order (Cambridge U.P., 2005). His articles have appeared in such journals as Cambridge Journal of Economics, History of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Methodology, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, and Ecological Economics.

He is also a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy and a trustee of the Hugh Moore Historical Park in Easton, Pennsylvania. Previously, he was the principal investigator of the Lehigh Valley Engaged Humanities Consortium grant and a board member of the Fleming Museum of Art.

Courses Taught
Economics 101: Principles of Economics
Economics 205: Markets and Democracy
Economics 409: Justice and the Economic
First Year Seminar 017: Making Change Democratically