Curated category
Corresponding fellows of the British Academy
- Kenneth PomeranzKenneth Pomeranz asked a question that historians had been avoiding for centuries: why did industrialization happen in Europe, and not in China?
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at the age of 10, absorbed by the fall of Barcelona and the destruction of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement.
- William JamesWilliam James was born at the Astor House in New York City on the 11th of January 1842, and by the time he died in Chocorua, New Hampshire on the 26th of…
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and…
- Esther DufloEsther Duflo was born on the 25th of October 1972 in Paris, and by the age of 46 she had become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in…
- Wilbur Kitchener JordanWilbur Kitchener Jordan grew up in the quiet town of Lynnville, Indiana. He left that small community to attend Oakland City College.
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy…
- Edmund HusserlEdmund Husserl was born on the 8th of April 1859 in Proßnitz, a small town in the Margraviate of Moravia, the second of four children of a Jewish milliner.
- Paul SamuelsonPaul Samuelson stood at a lectern in a University of Chicago classroom on the 2nd of January, 1932, and later said that was the exact moment he was born as…
- Angus DeatonAngus Deaton was born on the 19th of October 1945 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and he grew up to become one of the economists whose work most fundamentally…
- Walter BurkertWalter Burkert was born on the 2nd of February 1931 in Neuendettelsau, Germany, and over the course of a long career he changed how the modern world thinks…
- Daniel KahnemanDaniel Kahneman was born on the 5th of March, 1934, in Tel Aviv, while it was still the British Mandate of Palestine. He would go on to win the Nobel…
- Oliver Hart (economist)Oliver Hart walked into a courtroom not to give testimony about a crime, but to explain what it means to truly own something.
- C. Vann WoodwardC. Vann Woodward was born on the 13th of November 1908, in Vanndale, Arkansas, a small town that bore his own mother's family name and had served as a county…
- Hilary PutnamHilary Putnam was a philosopher who changed his mind for a living. He arrived at Harvard in 1965, organized campus protests, taught courses on Marxism, and…
- Ronald CoaseRonald Harry Coase was born on the 29th of December 1910 in Willesden, a suburb of London, and he would live to the age of 102 - long enough to see ideas he…
- Susan AtheySusan Athey grew up watching her father, Whit Athey, work as a physics scholar, while her mother Elizabeth Johansen edited texts and taught English.
- Pieter GeylPieter Geyl spent thirteen months inside Buchenwald concentration camp with a half-finished argument in his pocket. The Dutch historian had written an…
- Kurt GödelKurt Friedrich Gödel, born on the 28th of April 1906 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, died in Princeton Hospital on the 14th of January 1978, weighing so little…
- Michael RostovtzeffMichael Rostovtzeff arrived in the United States in 1920, a refugee from a revolution he would spend the rest of his life trying to understand.
- Eric FonerEric Foner, born on the 7th of February 1943 in New York City, is the historian that college professors reach for most often.
- Joel MokyrJoel Mokyr was born on the 26th of July 1946 in Leiden, Netherlands, into a family of Dutch Jews who had survived the Holocaust.
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract.
- George CœdèsGeorge Cœdès was born in Paris on the 10th of August 1886, and by the time he died on the 2nd of October 1969, he had done something few scholars manage: he…
- William BaumolWilliam Jack Baumol was born on the 26th of February 1922 in the South Bronx, to immigrant parents who had come from Eastern Europe.