The Age of Polycrisis: Economics, Climate & Geopolitics in the 21st Century
2026, Economy, Engage in Global Challenges, Climate + Environment
Simon Fraser University proudly welcomes Professor Adam Tooze as the 2026 Munro Lecture visiting speaker.
Tooze, a leading economic historian and public intellectual, has transformed how we understand the global financial system, modern economic history, and the forces shaping international affairs. Drawing on his acclaimed books, Crashed and Shutdown, as well as his widely read Chartbook newsletter and international commentary, he will examine today’s emerging polycrisis—the convergence of financial instability, intensifying geopolitical competition, and climate pressures—and what it reveals about the evolving global economy and the challenges facing governments, markets, and societies. The lecture will be followed by a moderated discussion and audience Q&A.
Doors Open: 6:30pm
Event: 7:00-9:00pm
The Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema
SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC V6B 1H4
On this page
The Munro Lecture is an annual address that brings leading scholars to SFU in recognition of our former Vice President Academic and Provost, Jock Munro.
Adam Tooze
Adam holds the Shelby Cullom Davis chair of History at Columbia University and serves as Director of the European Institute. In 2019, Foreign Policy Magazine named him one of the top Global Thinkers of the decade.
Adam was born in London. He grew up between England and Heidelberg Germany. Having received his BA in Economics from King’s College Cambridge in the summer of 1989, he had the good fortune to witness the end of the Cold War in Berlin, where he began his postgraduate studies. He went on to take his PhD from the London School of Economics. From 1996 to 2009 Adam taught at the University of Cambridge, where he was Reader in Modern History and Gurnee Hart fellow in History at Jesus College. After Cambridge, Adam was appointed to the Barton M. Biggs Professorship at Yale University, where he succeeded Paul Kennedy as the Director of International Security Studies. Adam joined Columbia’s history department in the summer of 2015.
In February 2011 Adam served as Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Professor in Military History at West Point.
He has appeared on PBS Television, BBC Radio, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the History Channel, Swiss and French television.
Adam’s first book, Statistics and the German State: the Making of Modern Economic Knowledge appeared in 2001. Wages of Destruction: the Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy was published in 2006 and Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931 in 2014.
For these books Adam won the Leverhulme prize fellowship, the H-Soz-Kult Historisches Buch Prize, the Longman History Today Prize, the Wolfson Prize and the LA Times History Prize. He was shortlisted for the Kirkus review, Duff Cooper and Hessel Tiltman prize and his books have featured in the book of the year lists of the Financial Times, LA Times, Kirkus Review, Foreign Affairs and the Economist.