Award-Winning Historian Adam Tooze Speaks on Shutdown, COVID, and the World Economy

Award-Winning British historian Adam Tooze will deliver the 2021 PPE Distinguished Public Lecture at Virginia Tech.

Adam Tooze is the Shelby Cullom Davis Chair of History and Director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Professor Tooze has broad research interests in the fields of twentieth-century and contemporary history. From a start in modern German history with a special focus on the history of economics and economic history, his interests have widened to take in a range of themes in political, intellectual and military history, across a canvass stretching from Europe across the Atlantic.

Professor Tooze’s books include, Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Penguin Allen Lane, 2006), The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931 (Penguin Allen Lane 2014), and Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Penguin Random House 2018).

Professor Tooze’s most recent book offers an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis and its ten-year aftermath as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world. The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize and was a New York Times notable book of 2018, one of the Economist’s Books of the Year, and a New York Times Critics’ Top Book. In 2019, Foreign Policy Magazine named Professor Tooze as one of the top Global Thinkers of the decade.

At Virginia Tech, Professor Tooze will speak about the “Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy.” The virtual lecture will take place on April 21, 2021, from 5-6:30pm (Eastern Time). Professor Tooze’s new book on this topic will come out later this year.

All faculty, students, and members of the public are welcome to attend. Advance registration is required for this event under this link. Here is a link to the VT News feature about the lecture.

If you are an individual with a disability and desire an accommodation, please contact the Virginia Tech production team (production@nullvt.edu) at least ten business days before the event.

More than 150 faculty members and students attended the lecture, with the attendees joining from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Columbia, Iceland, and South Korea.