Peter Lindert is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California – Davis and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to arriving at Davis in 1977, he was Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin, where for a time his colleagues included EHA Fellows Jeffrey Williamson and Claudia Goldin. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Cambridge, and the University of Essex, and delivered the Sir John Hicks Lecture at Oxford, and the Angus Maddison Development Lecture in Paris. He earned his BA at Princeton and his PhD at Cornell, but his interest in economics was fist sparked in high school, where he and classmate Richard Sylla (EHA Fellow, class of 2019) took an economics class together. His specific focus on economic history was developed at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He did not have an economic history mentor at Cornell, but considers his frequent co-author, Jeffrey Williamson, to be his mentor in the field. Lindert served as editor of the Journal of Economic History, as well as vice president and president of the Economic History Association. He is a Fellow of the Cliometric Society, and a recipient of the Gallman-Parker Prize awarded by the EHA for lifetime contribution to data set creation. He has also been recognized for his outstanding teaching. He received the Jonathan Hughes Prize for Excellence in Teaching, awarded by the EHA, the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement, and was twice named a UC Davis Distinguished Teacher. He has authored numerous books and articles on topics as diverse as income distribution, sovereign debt, and soil quality (he was Director of the UC Davis Agricultural History Center for twenty years). His two volume book Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century won both the Allan Sharlin Prize for Best Book in Social History and the EHA’s Ranki Prize for Best Book in European Economic History in 2004. In 2019 the Economic History Association recognized Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson with the creation of the Lindert-Williamson Prize for outstanding book in global, African, Asian, Australian, and/or South American History.
