The celebrated historian, Niall Ferguson, captured the attention and admiration of the audience at last week’s lecture at Tufts.

Historian Niall Ferguson spoke at Tufts University on The Financial Crisis and the Descent of the West on Thursday, October 13. A weekly columnist for Newsweek and a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television, Ferguson is a prolific commentator on contemporary politics and economics and writes and reviews regularly for the British and American press. Named one of the world’s most influential people by Time Magazine, he was one of a handful of economic writers who accurately predicted the financial crisis that began in 2007.

As a Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, senior research fellow at Jesus College at Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Ferguson focuses on economic and financial history, international relations and military conflict.

Ferguson’s bold, often controversial, views have led many to describe him as a “rock-star historian” for his debating style and thought-provoking opinions. Ferguson is considered to be exactly the sort of figure Richard E. Snyder had in mind when he established the President’s Lecture Series at Tufts. The series, endowed by Snyder, a 1995 Tufts graduate and former chairman and CEO of Simon and Schuster, is designed to bring to Tufts speakers who challenge conventional wisdom in their professional work.

Ferguson is known for his bestselling 2003 book Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, charting the entire rise and fall of the British Empire. Other books he has authored include 2004’s Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West in 2006, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World from 2008, and The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg in 2010. His most recent book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, will be published in November 2011.

Ferguson is also an award-winning documentary maker. He has created documentaries on his books Empire and Colossus and a series on PBS for his books The War of the World and The Ascent of Money, for which he won the International Emmy award for best documentary. A film based on his interviews with Henry Kissinger won similar recognition at the 2011 New York Film Festival.