We are delighted to welcome Professor Leonard Wantchekon of Princeton University as this year’s Centenary Visiting Professor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).
Professor Wantchekon is the James Madison Professor of Political Economy, Professor of Politics, and International Affairs at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Economics from Northwestern in 1995 and was on the faculty at Yale and New York University.
His research centers on political economy, development economics, and economic history with
a regional focus on Africa and methodological focus on experimentation. His substantive topics include democracy and development, education and social mobility, and the long-term social impact of slavery and colonial rule.
Alongside his role at Princeton, Professor Wantchekon is the Founder and President of the African School of Economics and the Pan African Scientific Research Council.
Professor Wantchekon was winner of the 2023 Global Economy Prize, awarded by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society (an international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation to statistics and mathematics). He served as Vice President of the American Political Science Association and is on the United Nations High-Level Expert Group on “Beyond GDP”.
The Centenary Visiting Professorship was established to mark the 100th anniversary of the PPE degree at Oxford and was made possible by an anonymous gift from an Old Member of The Queen’s College and a friend of University College.
The Professorship rotates between Queen’s and University College and among the three disciplines that make up PPE. It was created to bring leading international scholars to Oxford and to encourage new thinking and exchange across disciplinary boundaries, engaging undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as faculty.
Professor Wantchekon follows previous Centenary Visiting Professors Mathias Thoenig of the University of Lausanne and Christina L. Davis of Harvard University.
