Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson was born in Glasgow in 1964 and graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, with First Class Honors in 1985. He earned his DPhil from Oxford in 1989 after research fellowships, including as a Hanseatic Scholar in Hamburg and Berlin. His early career included roles as a research fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge (1989), official fellow and lecturer at Peterhouse, Cambridge (1990-1992), and fellow and tutor in modern history at Jesus College, Oxford, where he became professor of political and financial history in 2000. In 2002, Ferguson moved to the United States, taking the Herzog Chair in Financial History at New York University's Stern Business School before joining Harvard in 2004 as Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (until 2011 for the latter). He left Harvard in 2016 to become Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and senior faculty fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center. Other roles include senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford; Philippe Roman Visiting Professor at LSE (2010-2011); visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing (2016-2021); and current visiting professor at LSE. Ferguson is a prolific author of sixteen books on topics like empire, finance, and catastrophe, with notable works including his multi-volume Henry Kissinger biography (first volume Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist in 2015) and Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (2021). He has produced award-winning documentaries, such as The Ascent of Money (International Emmy, 2009), and advised on UK education policy. Beyond academia, he founded Greenmantle LLC (managing director), co-founded Latin American fintech Ualá, and serves as a trustee for the Centre for Policy Studies, New York Historical Society, and University of Austin.