Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist serving as Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and Director of Metropolitan Studies at NYU. Her book Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London (University of Chicago 2006) examines how market ideals and material technologies orient practices of economic rationality in the work of derivatives traders, room managers, and technology designers. Zaloom is also completing a study of the challenges to liberal understandings of autonomy and choice posed by the emerging field of Neuroeconomics, a science that links economic decisions to the neural substrate. Her most current work asks how middle-class Americans learn to live with debt. This research is taking her from Bay Area mega-churches to government archives on housing policy.