Professor Roger Backhouse FBA

The history of economics, focusing on the twentieth century, including applied economics, macroeconomics, economics and the other social sciences, Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson

Elected 2014

Roger Backhouse is Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics at the University of Birmingham and Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has taught the history of economics in Birmingham since 1980, in Erasmus University since 2009, and in the University of Oporto since 1999, and has been an Invited Professor at the École normale supérieure de Cachan, and the University of Paris I. He has also taught at University College London, the University of Keele, and the University of Bristol. His current project is writing a two-volume intellectual biography of Paul Samuelson. It was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship from 2011-14, at the end of which he took partial early retirement in order to finish it. He is also co-organizer of a project on recent turn towards applied economics and is involved in an ongoing project on the history of welfare economics. His work covers Keynes and the Keynesian revolution, the history of disequilibrium macroeconomics, the history of ideas on secular stagnation, historiography and the history of the social sciences since 1945. Backhouse, R.E., 2015, Revisiting Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, Journal of Economic Literature, 53(2), pp. 326-50. Backhouse, R.E., & Fontaine, P. (eds), 2014, A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Backhouse, R.E. & Boianovsky, M., 2013, Transforming Modern Macroeconomics: Searching for Disequilibrium Microfoundations, 1956-2003, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Backhouse, R.E. & Bateman, B.W., 2011, Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Backhouse, R.E., & Fontaine, P. (eds), 2010, The History of the Social Sciences Since 1945, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Backhouse, R.E., 2010, The Puzzle of Modern Economics: Science or Ideology? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Current post

Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics, University of Birmingham; Part time Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Past appointments

University of Birmingham Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics, University of Birmingham; Part time Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam

1970 -

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