Niall Ferguson leaving Harvard for Stanford

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Continuing Stanford’s recent run of success in hires and appointments, award-winning Harvard University history professor Niall Ferguson is the latest academic to come to Stanford. Having already been an adjunct senior fellow at the Hoover Institution for the past 10 years, Ferguson will take up a full-time senior fellowship at the University-affiliated think tank.

The prominent Scottish academic and political commentator, who has previously taught at New York University, Oxford, the London School of Economics and the New College of the Humanities, is vacating the Lawrence A. Tisch Professorship of History at Harvard. Ferguson does not plan on immediately taking up a teaching role at Stanford.

“Harvard is a remarkable institution, and I have been more fulfilled here as a teacher and scholar there than at any time in my professional career,” wrote Ferguson in a Facebook post announcing his departure. “I shall miss the intellectual ferment and my many friends there, but this really is a perfect time for me to take a break from the classroom.”

The 51-year-old economic historian has spent the last 12 years at Harvard and is currently working on a biography of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger – of which the first volume, “Kissinger: The Idealist,” was published last month. According to Ferguson, the book is the partial culmination of approximately a decade of work, and he plans to focus on completing the biography during his tenure at Hoover. ...