Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University.  His most recent book is The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (2009).

Professor Mokyr received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1974.  At Northwestern, he holds a professorship in economics as well as the Strotz Professorship of Arts and Sciences.  He is also a Sackler Professorial Fellow at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, University of Tel Aviv.  He has served as editor of the Journal of Economic History and editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and he is editor-in-chief of the Princeton Economic History of the Western World.  He is a former president of the Economic History Association. 

Among his publications are The Lever of Riches (1990), The British Industrial Revolution (1993; 2d rev’d ed. 1998), and The Gifts of Athena (2002). He is currently working on a volume titled Neither Fluke nor Destiny: Evolutionary Models in Economic History.