About

Peter Frankopan is one of the world’s leading historians, and the author of multi-million copy global bestseller The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, named one of the ‘Books of the Decade’ (2010-20) by the Sunday Times. Peter’s most recent book The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, published in 2023, became an international bestseller and was named the Times History Book of the Year.

Peter is Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where he is Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is also UNESCO Professor of Silk Roads Studies and a Bye-Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge. He has held visiting Fellowships at Princeton and Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard) and has lectured at universities all over the world including Cambridge, Harvard, Yale and NYU. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Geographic Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Royal Anthropological Institute and President of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs.

He works closely with governments and multi-lateral institutions including the World Bank, the UNDP, the European Union, the Irish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Asian Development Bank on issues ranging across geopolitics, security, energy, infrastructure and climate change.

Peter has also given expert advice, chaired meetings and delivered keynote speeches for governments across the globe, from moderating sessions at the United Nations, to providing expert evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on the UK’s engagement in Central Asia; and even authoring the post-pandemic economic recovery plan for countries including China, Afghanistan, Mongolia and Pakistan.

In 2019, Peter was named one of the World’s 50 Top Thinkers by Prospect Magazine.

Peter is actively involved with several charities and chairs the Frankopan Fund, which has granted almost 500 scholarships and awards to outstanding young scholars from Croatia to study at leading academic institutions in the UK, USA and Europe.

Peter is also a hotelier, chairing a collection of family businesses in the UK, France, Croatia and the Netherlands, including A Curious Group of Hotels which he set up with his wife, Jessica.

A keen sportsman, Peter won blues at both Oxford and Cambridge for Fives. One of his proudest achievements is representing Croatia at cricket. Peter plays cricket for the Authors CC, who in recent years, have toured India and Sri Lanka, and played against the Vatican.