James Robinson is a University Professor at the Harris School for Public Policy, the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and recipient of the 2024 Recipient of the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He studied economics at the London School of Economics, the University of Warwick and Yale University and previously taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Southern California, the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. He is the co-author with Daron Acemoglu of Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Why Nations Fail, (which has been translated into 51 languages including Amharic, Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Mongolian and Somali), and The Narrow Corridor. His next book, on Sub-Saharan Africa, entitled Wealth in People will be published by Random House in 2027. His research uses the quantitative and mathematical methods of economics but in combination with the more qualitative, hermeneutical and case-study based approaches of other social sciences. He is currently conducting research in Botswana, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Nigeria where he is a Fellow and Visiting Professor at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria-Nsukka and where he helps to organize the annual Chinua Achebe Conference. He taught every summer for 28 years at the University of the Andes in Bogotá where he is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Economics. He taught research design in the collaborative African PhD program in economics run by the African Economic Research Consortium in Nairobi and in 2026 initiated the first annual summer school on African social science at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Statistique et d’Economie Appliquée d’Abidjan in the Côte d’Ivoire.