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Niall Ferguson
Profile of Niall Ferguson
Biography
Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of Financial History at the Stern Business School, New York University, and Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, where he is also Visiting Professor of History. He also holds a Senior Fellowship at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Born in Glasgow in 1964, he was a Demy at Magdalen College and graduated with First Class Honours in 1985. After two years as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin, he took up a Research Fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1989, subsequently moving to a Lectureship at Peterhouse.
His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1997), was a UK bestseller and subsequently published in the US, Germany, Spain and elsewhere (Basic/WB/Taurus).
In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (Penguin/Basic Books/DVA/Corbaccio) and The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (Orion/ Penguin/DVA). 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 (Penguin/Basic/DVA), the fruit of a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England.
He is a regular contributor to television and radio, and recently wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, broadcast in the UK earlier this year. The accompanying book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Penguin/Basic), has been a bestseller in both Britain and the U.S.
A prolific commentator on contemporary politics, he writes and reviews regularly for the British and American press. He and his family divide their time between New York and Oxfordshire.
In July 2004 he was appointed to the chair in international history at Harvard University.
He has written in and edited:
Academic journals: Past and Present, English Historical Review, Journal of Economic History, Economic History Review.
Newspapers: Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Guardian, Independent, Le Monde, New York Times, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Sunday Times, The Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Die Welt
Magazines: New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Spectator, Times Literary Supplement.
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