Adam Tooze

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 and economic shifts that help to navigate our dynamic contemporary world.

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Named one of the world’s top thinkers by both Foreign Policy and Prospect Magazine, he has authored many critically acclaimed books that have been translated into 11 languages. His latest, Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy 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. His next release, Carbon, is a history of the climate crisis.

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Tooze’s book, Crashed: How A Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, was called a “monumental narrative history” of the financial crisis of 2008 and its global aftermath by Financial Times. The Observer declared it the most significant effort to date to comprehensively analyze the impact of the financial crisis, not just in 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.

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He is the host of the weekly Foreign Policy economics podcast Ones and Tooze, where he and co-host Cameron Abadi attempt to explain the world, one episode at a time. Each episode revolves around two data points — one pulled from the week’s headlines and the other a fascinating tangent — offering an in-depth look at current events and placing them into historical context.

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Formerly a professor at both the University of Cambridge and Yale University, and a visiting professor of military history at West Point, Tooze currently 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 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.

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He has written for Financial Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, Telegraph, The Observer, Prospect Magazine, TLS, the London Review of Books, New Left Review, Dissent, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, Die Zeit, Spiegel, TAZ, and Sueddeutsche Zeitung. In 2009, Tooze was appointed to the academic panel charged by the Bundesfinanzministerium (Germany’s Federal Ministry of Finance) with writing the Ministry’s history in the period of the Third Reich. He penned the volume on public debt.

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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.

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He is bilingual in English and German and has functional French.

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