Prof. Andrew Thompson
Member of the Global Faculty
Chair of Global and Imperial History at the University of Oxford, and the Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Global History
Professor Thompson is the Chair of Global and Imperial History at the University of Oxford, and the Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Global History. For five years previously to his current role, he was the Chief Executive of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council as well as the International Champion for UK Research and Innovation, a grouping of all of the UK’s nine research Councils. In 2021, he was awarded a CBE in the UK’s New Years’ Honours List for “services to research”.
He is a member of the Global Commission on Modern Slavery, where he leads one of the Commission’s workstreams on “Civil Society in Crisis Contexts”; and he is the Vice-Chair of Trustees of Royal Museums Greenwich, where is the Lead Trustee for a major cultural heritage renovation project of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.
His is currently completing his next book for Oxford University Press: Humanitarianism on Trial: How a Global System of Aid, Development and Human Rights emerged through the End of Empire.
Selected Publications
- Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson (eds.), Oxford Handbook on the Ends of Empire (2019) – 37 chapters plus an editor’s introduction.
- Writing Imperial Histories (Manchester University Press, 2013) – a publication to mark the 100th publication in the flagship “Studies-In-Imperialism” Series of which I am Co-Editor.
- Britain’s Experience of Empire during the Twentieth Century, Companion Volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire Series (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.356.
- Empire and Globalisation. Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp.291 [Co-Authored with an Economist, Professor Gary Magee].
- The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid- Nineteenth Century (Pearson Longman, 2005), pp.374.