Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. In 2001 he published The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000, following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England. Niall Ferguson is a regular contributor to television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2003 he wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, the UK terrestrial broadcaster. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 by Penguin, and prompted Time magazine to name him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Two years later he published The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, a television adaptation of which was screened by PBS earlier this year. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World followed in 2008 and was also a PBS series, winning the International Emmy for Best Documentary. His latest book, High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg, was published by Penguin in 2010. In March 2011 he will publish Civilization: The West and the Rest, also a Channel 4/PBS documentary series. He is currently working on a life of Henry Kissinger. A prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics, Niall Ferguson is a columnist for Newsweek. He divides his time between the United States and the United Kingdom, where he is currently the Philippe Roman Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics.