Niall Ferguson, the Herzog Professor of Financial History at the Stern Business School, New York University, and a noted author, was recently appointed a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Ferguson also is a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, where he is a visiting professor of history.

"We're delighted to welcome Niall to the Hoover Institution," said Hoover director John Raisian. "He possesses a fresh, authoritative voice in history, political science, and economics, and has a respected reputation for his work on both sides of the Atlantic."

Ferguson's 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; the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Macmillan, 1997), was a best seller in the United Kingdom.

In 1998 he published, to international critical acclaim, The Pity of War: Explaining World War One (Basic Books) and The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (Penguin). 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 (Basic), the product of a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England.

His books have been translated and published in Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Korea, and Taiwan.

He is a regular contributor to television and radio and recently completed a six-part history of the British Empire for Channel 4, broadcast last year in the United Kingdom. His latest book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (Basic), has been a best seller in both Britain and the United States. This spring he will publish Colossus: The Price of America's Empire (Penguin).

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 the United States and Oxfordshire.

Born in Glasgow in 1964, Niall Ferguson was awarded a Demyship (half-fellowship) for his academic achievements by Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1981 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.

The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic public policy and international affairs, with an internationally renowned archives.

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