Jeremy Adelman


Jeremy Adelman, is a Canadian historian who was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, from 2014 to 2023, before moving to the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the director of the Global History Lab at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Cambridge. Previously, he served as the director of the Council for International Teaching and Research, the director of the Program in Latin American Studies and chair of the History Department at Princeton. His areas of scholarship include Latin American and global history.

Education

Adelman obtained his B.A. in political economy from the University of Toronto in 1984, his M.Sc. in economic history from the London School of Economics in 1985, and his D.Phil. in modern history from the University of Oxford in 1989. At Oxford, he was a member of St. Antony's College.

Career

He has taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Essex in England, the Instituto Torcuato di Tella in Argentina, and at Princeton since 1992, and has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Institut d'études politiques, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and the Institute for Human Sciences. His current initiatives include the formation of the Global History Collaborative with colleagues in Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo. Adelman's forthcoming book, is provisionally titled Depending on Strangers: Love and Fear in the Making of the Modern World. He is currently working on a history of Latin America and the history of human security. In 2023, Adelman retired from Princeton and relocated to the University of Cambridge together with the Global History Lab. In 2024, was elected to a fellowship at Darwin College. In 2025, he was elected to be a Fellow of the British Academy.
His awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship of the American Council for Learned Societies.
Adelman is also committed to creating and supporting connected and inclusive learning in fractured societies. He has written and presented courses in global history on various platforms, Coursera, , and EdX under the Global History Lab. The initiative branched in September 2016, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Geneva, to outreach programs to refugees in Kenya, Jordan, Rwanda and Uganda. The GHL now integrates a full-year curriculum of three courses in global history, oral history and documentary methods, and supervised research projects for students worldwide. In 2020, it ceased to be a MOOC and became a network program shared across 25 institutions in 23 countries. Tens of thousands of students have completed GHL courses from Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Germany to Colombia, Greece and Nigeria.

Personal life

Adelman is married to Deborah Prentice, the vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge; they have three children.

Works

  • Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World Winner, American Historical Association James A. Rawley Prize for the best book in Atlantic History
  • Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic
  • Co-authored, World Together, Worlds Apart: An Introduction to World History From the Beginnings of Humankind to the Present 7th Edition
  • Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ .
  • El idealista prágmatico: La odisea de Alberto O. Hirschman. Ediciones Uniandes
  • The Essential Hirschman. Princeton University Press 2015
  • Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History Routledge 1999.
  • Co-edited with Stephen Aron, Trading Cultures: The Worlds of Western Merchants..
  • Los años del daguerrotipo: Primeras fotografías argentinas, 1843-1870.. Palgrave MacMillan 1992.
  • Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge. Bloomsbury 2019.
  • Co-edited with Gyan Prakash, Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South. Bloomsbury 2022.
  • Co-edited with Andreas Eckert, Narratives, Nations, and Other World Products in the Making of Global History. Bloomsbury 2024.

    Critical studies and reviews of Adelman's work

  • Reviews of Worldly philosopher and The essential Hirschman.