Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor Steven Schwartz, said that Ferguson – a world-leading historian as well as a scholar of politics, finance and economics; a prolific author; and a public intellectual – was richly deserving of the University\’s highest academic honour.

\”There is no doubt that Professor Ferguson is one the leading academic voices of the age,\” Schwartz said. \”Through his many books, television series and media interviews he has applied his singular insight and superior scholarship to the major issues of our day and brought them into the living rooms of millions, and so earns our respect and admiration as a public intellectual.\”

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 at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

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, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals was a UK bestseller.

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.

2001 saw the appearance of The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000, written after a year as a Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England.

Professor Ferguson is a regular contributor to television and radio in both the UK and the US. In 2003 he wrote and presented a six-part history of the British Empire for the UK television station Channel 4. The accompanying book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States. The sequel, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, was published in 2004 and was the basis for a two-hour documentary for Channel 4.

In 2006 he published The War of the World, a history of twentieth-century conflict, which was also featured on Britain\’s Channel 4 and PBS.

Professor Ferguson\’s highly successful book and television series, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, appeared in November 2008.

His most recent book, released just last month, is High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg, a study of the renowned innovator of investment banking.

Professor Ferguson is currently working on a biography of Henry Kissinger.