Niall Ferguson

Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School. Philippe Roman Chair in History & International Affairs at LSE IDEAS

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 Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. As a historian, he specialises in economics, finance, and colonialism. He is currently the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE IDEAS for the 2010-2011 academic year.

After studying at the University of Oxford, and in Hamburg and Berlin, Ferguson became a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, before returning to Oxford to lecture in history. He was appointed Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford in 2002, and was chosen for the Herzog Chair in Financial History at the Stern Business School, NYU in 2004. He assumed his current position at Harvard in 2004.

Ferguson has published a number of history books on a wide range of themes, from economics and finance (The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild, 1998), to colonialism (Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, 2003) and counterfactual history (The Pity of War, 1997). Four of his books have been turned into documentaries for television, the most recent of which was 2008's The Ascent of Money. Ferguson also contributes, as a political commentator, to The Financial Times, having previously written for The Sunday Telegraph.