Harold James, the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University, is Professor of History and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a professor in the Department of History. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 1982 and served as a Fellow of Peterhouse for eight years before joining Princeton in 1986. Currently, he directs the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society, holds an associate position at the Bendheim Center for Finance, serves as the official historian of the International Monetary Fund, and is the Alexandre Lamfalussy Senior Research Fellow.

In History, James's research centers on economic and financial history, modern European history, globalization, international monetary cooperation, and economic crises. He has published extensively, with key books including The German Slump (1986), International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods (1996), The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (2001), Family Capitalism (2006), The Roman Predicament (2006), The Creation and Destruction of Value (2009), Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (2012), Making the European Monetary Union (2012), The Euro and the Battle of Ideas (2016), Making a Modern Central Bank: The Bank of England, 1979–2003 (2020), The War of Words: A Glossary of Globalization (2021), and Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (2023).

His co-authored history of Deutsche Bank (1995) won the Financial Times Global Business Book Award in 1996. James received the Helmut Schmidt Prize for Economic History in 2004 and the Ludwig Erhard Prize in 2005. Seven Crashes was shortlisted for the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize. He chairs the Editorial Board of World Politics, writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, and teaches courses such as Financial History and Europe in the World: From 1776 to the Present Day at Princeton.

Professional Email: hjames@princeton.edu