BIO

Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers 2019.
Prospect Magazine’s The world’s top 50 thinkers 2019.

Prize-winning historian, writer and economic commentator. Adam Tooze combines deep historical expertise with up to date economic analysis to answer questions about current and future political power and economical shifts that could be used to navigate in our dynamic contemporary world. Adam has advised governments and ministries and toured the world as a lecturer.

Adam’s newest book is titled „Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy”. The book weaves finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything.

Professor Tooze teaches and researches widely in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary history with a special focus on the history of economics and a range of themes in political, intellectual and military history, across a canvas stretching from Europe to the Atlantic. He is currently working on the history of the climate crisis. Professor Tooze’s book, „Crashed: How A Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World”, was called, according to the Financial Times, “monumental narrative history” of the financial crisis of 2008 and its global aftermath. The Observer declared it the most significant effort to date to comprehensively analyze the impact of the financial crisis not just on the United States and Europe, but in Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia as well. „Crashed…” is the fourth in a quartet of books exploring trans-Atlantic economics and power over the course of the American century. „Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: the Making of Modern Economic Knowledge” explored how economic experts laid the foundations of our current macroeconomic knowledge and assisted in the management of Hitler’s war machine.

Tooze teaches at Columbia University where he is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and the Director of the European Institute. Adam previously taught at the University of Cambridge and at Yale University, where he was the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History and the Director of International Security Studies. Adam served as Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Professor in Military History at West Point.

He has written for the Financial Times, the New York Times, Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph, the Observer, Prospect Magazine, the TLS, the LRB, the New left Review and Dissent, the WSJ, the New York Review of Books, Die Zeit, Spiegel, TAZ, and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
In 2009, Tooze was appointed to the academic panel charged by the Bundesfinanzministerum (Federal Finance Ministry) with writing the Ministry’s history in the period of the Third Reich. He has responsibility for the volume dealing with public debt.
Adam won the Leverhulme prize fellowship, the H-Soz-Kult Historisches Buch Prize, the Longman History Today Prize, the Wolfson Prize and the LA Times History Prize for his books on history and economy.

Apart from English he is bilingual in German and has functional French.