CURRICULUM VITAE
JOEL MOKYR, ROBERT H. STROTZ PROFESSOR
PhD: Yale University, 1974
Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and
History at Northwestern University and Sackler Professor (by special appointment) at the Eitan
Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. He specializes in economic history and
the economics of technological change and population change. He is the author of Why Ireland
Starved: An Analytical and Quantitative Study of the Irish Economy, The Lever of Riches:
Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic
Perspective, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy, and The
Enlightened Economy: an Economic history of Britain, 1700-1850. His most recent book is A
Culture of Growth, published by Princeton University Press in 2016. He has authored over 100
articles and books in his field.
He has served as the senior editor of the Journal of Economic History from 1994 to 1998, and was
editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History (published in July 2003), and serves
as editor in chief of a book series, the Princeton University Press Economic History of the Western
World. He served as President of the Economic History Association 2003-04, President of the
Midwest Economics Association in 2007/08, President of the Atlantic Economic Association
(2015/16), and is a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves as chair of the
advisory committee of the Institutions, Organizations, and Growth program of the Canadian Institute
of Advanced Research. He served as chair of the Economics Department at Northwestern University
between 1998 and 2001 and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral
Sciences at Stanford between Sept. 2001 and June 2002.
Professor Mokyr has an undergraduate degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D.
from Yale University. He has taught at Northwestern since 1974, and has been a visiting Professor
at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the
University of Tel Aviv, University College of Dublin, and the University of Manchester. In 2006 he
was awarded the biennial Heineken Prize by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences for a lifetime
achievement in historical science. In 2015 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Economic History
awarded once every twenty years. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
a foreign fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, a
corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the
Cliometric Society. In 2018 he was elected as a distinguished fellow of the American Economic
Association. His books have won a number of important prizes including the Joseph Schumpeter
memorial prize, the Ranki prize for the best book in European Economic history, the Donald Price
Prize of the American Political Science Association, and the Allan Sharlin Prize of the Social
Science History Association. He was made a doctor honoris causa by the National University of
Uruguay in 2018. He was awarded the Jonathan Hughes Prize for excellence in the teaching of
economic history by the Economic History Association in 2019.
