Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford.

Niall has written and presented five major television series, including The Ascent of Money, which won the 2009 International Emmy award for Best Documentary. His most recent books are Civilization: The West and the Rest (2012) also a major TV documentary series, and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg (2010).

His first book, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One, and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. 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, following a year as Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England.

Other books he has written include: Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997), Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2003), Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (2004) and The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006).

A weekly columnist for Newsweek and a contributing editor for Bloomberg TV, Niall divides his time between the United States and the United Kingdom. He is currently working on a life of Henry Kissinger. The film based on his interviews with Kissinger won the 2011 New York Film Festival prize for Best Documentary.

The London Sunday Times called Civilization “a masterpiece … a pulsing energy suffuses his account and fascinating facts burst like fireworks on every page”. In 2004 Time magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.