Elected: 2020
Discipline: Language, Literature and History
Professor Niall Ferguson
Milbank Family Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Niall Ferguson is deeply interested in past, present and future relationships between Scotland, England, Europe and the rest of the world; this is a common theme across his vast spectrum of work as an historian. Niall holds the positions of Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Senior Faculty Fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, as well as holding a visiting professorship at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of fifteen books, an award-winning filmmaker, newspaper columnist, and the founder and managing director of the advisory firm Greenmantle LLC.
Of his Honorary Fellowship, he said: “The RSE can trace its origins back to the 18th-Century Enlightenment, a time when Scottish thinkers collectively achieved some of the greatest intellectual advances in human history. It is a humbling honour to become a Fellow of this extraordinary institution. I relish the opportunity to help maintain the great tradition of innovation in Scotland.”
Of his Honorary Fellowship, he said: “The RSE can trace its origins back to the 18th-Century Enlightenment, a time when Scottish thinkers collectively achieved some of the greatest intellectual advances in human history. It is a humbling honour to become a Fellow of this extraordinary institution. I relish the opportunity to help maintain the great tradition of innovation in Scotland.”