Bio

Welcome to my website. I am a historian of international economic relations, focusing on business and financial history, the sociology of elites, and European cooperation and integration. I am particularly interested in the use of digital methods in historical research.

I am Professor of History of European Cooperation and Integration at the European University Institute in Florence. I am Non Resident Fellow at Bruegel. I am also Co-Director of the Alcide De Gasperi Research Centre (ADG), a unique research hub on European cooperation and integration from the twentieth century to the present. The ADG is a joint initiative of the Historical Archives of the European Union and the EUI’s Department of History and Civilisation. The ADG supports researchers in the field, coordinates networks of historians, facilitates the use of primary sources and increases public interest in the history of European integration. It organises the Annual Graduate Conference in the History of European Integration, gathering around 25 leading scholars in the field every year .

Before joining the EUI, I was Professor of International Economic History at the University of Glasgow, which I joined in 2011. I have held visiting and research positions at the Institute for European Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2014 to 2018), Keio University (2011), Columbia University (2013), the University of Economics in Prague (2016), the University of Tokyo (2020), and I held a Jean Monnet Fellowship at the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre (2017-18).

I studied in France, the UK, and Italy. I studied for my undergraduate at the Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) in Strasbourg (BA Hons), before moving on to the London School of Economics to complete an MSc in International History, and finally to the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence to study for my PhD in History. I was then Pinto Postdoctoral Fellow at LSE.

I am editorial board member of the journals Politique européenne (since 2013) and the Journal of Modern European History (since 2023). Since 2022, I am president of the International Association of Contemporary History of Europe / Association Internationale d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Europe, of which I am board member since 2016. I am also a member of the Centre for Business History in Scotland. I am a Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy.

Until 2023, I was Principal Investigator (PI) of the project EURECON, funded by a €1.5 million Starting Grant of the European Research Council (2017-2023). I was also one of the PIs of the project the Uses of the Past in International Economic Relations (UPIER) funded €1.2 million grant from the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) consortium (2016-2019).

My contributions to the field of international economic history have been in five domains, which are interrelated. These are (a) European monetary cooperation and integration (the project of Economic and Monetary Union, which is the subject of my next book with Cornell University Press, forthcoming in 2025 and the creation of the European Monetary System in the second half of the 1970s, which is the topic of A Europe Made of Money), (b) the development of international and European banking regulation and supervision (especially the origins of the European banking union and the Herstatt crisis) , (c) the rise of both global and European economic governance, specifically the European Council created in 1974 and the G7 created in 1975 (see this volume I edited with Federico Romero), (d) the international debt crises of the 1980s, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe, and more specifically Poland, and, bringing many of the above subjects together, (e) the history of capitalism and its relationship with European cooperation and integration. Across these different strands of work, I am particularly interested in the use and development of digital methods.

My work has appeared in journals such as the Contemporary European History, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, West European Politics, and Business History, among others.

My academic work and commentary has been featured in leading media outlets including Bloomberg, Il Sole 24 Ore, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal.

You can find more information about my CV, publications and presentations in the following pages of this site:

Institutional websites: European University Institute | Bruegel

ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5560-4333

Online social networks:academia.edu | Research Gate | LinkedIn

Follow me on X/twitter @manumourlon, BlueSky (@manumourlon.bsky.social), and Mastodon