Niall Ferguson

Harvard's Niall Ferguson is one of the world's leading historians of the global economy and author of such internationally-acclaimed works as The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, and The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. His new book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, is already an international bestseller and the basis for a multi-part television documentary.

Controversial, expansive, and eloquent, Ferguson has been called "the most talented British historian of his generation." But the ambitious themes he explores in his work have urgent relevance to the present as well as the past: the costs and benefits of economic globalization; the interface between finance and politics; the lessons to be learned from the British experience of empire; and most recently, the strengths and limitation of American global power.

A public intellectual whose work impacts finance, government, and academia, Ferguson 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 of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

A prolific commentator on contemporary economics and politics for the American and British press (as well as an experienced radio and television presenter), his work regularly appears in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, the New York Review of Books and many other publications. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times.