Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University.

Jeremy Adelman has lived and worked in seven countries and four continents. After graduating from the University of Toronto, he earned a masters’ degree in economic history at the London School of Economics (1985) and completed a doctorate in modern history at Oxford University (1989). His first book, Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada (1994), compares the agrarian systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Argentina and Canada. Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (1999), which won the American Historical Association’s Atlantic History Prize, explores the emergence of the Argentine republic and its incorporation into the world market in the nineteenth century. Subsequently, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (2006) tells the story of the downfall of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the making of nation states in South America, braiding together intellectual, economic, and political histories.  His most recent book, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (2013) is a chronicle of one of the twentieth century’s most original thinkers. Professor Adelman is also the editor of five books and coauthor, with colleagues in the History Department and elsewhere, of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart (4th edition, 2014), a history of the world from the beginning of humankind to the present. He has been the recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, as well as recognitions for his pioneering teaching at Princeton. Chair of the History Department for four years, founder the Council for International Teaching and Research, and currently the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Jeremy Adelman is the Director of the Global History Lab at Princeton University.

Currently, he is working on two books. Latin America: A Global History is forthcoming with Princeton University Press; it tells the story of what we now call Latin America as an on-going regional site for worldmaking and integration from 1492 to our days. He is also working on Earth Hunger, a study of how writers and artists, diplomats and ecologists, have been wrestling with the meaning of global inter-dependence and attitudes to strangers from the 1850s to the present.

See details on the Council.

See details on the Global History Lab.

Teaching Interests

Professor Adelman has taught survey courses on modern Latin America and seminars on such topics as the Age of Revolutions, U.S.-Latin American relations, and the history of money. He was for many years the director of Princeton’s Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS). In 2004 he received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Graduate seminar in the Global History of Capitalism

More recently, he has expanded Princeton's coverage of world and global history. He regularly offers graduate seminars in the history of globalization from 1400 He has converted the gateway course, History 201: A History of the World since 1300 into a public, open-access online course on the platform EdX. This year, he teamed up with partners at the University of Geneva and the UNHCR to co-teach the course in refugee camps in Kenya and Jordan. See more details about the course.

Adelman teaching refugees in Camp Kakuma in Kenya with Professor Barbara Moser-Mercer from University of Geneva