Jeff Fynn-Paul

Professor Jeff Fynn-Paul, PhD is a historian at a global top-20 university who has gone viral for telling history like it really was. Raised outside the historic Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, his upbringing instilled a love of history from an early age. Later, Fynn-Paul lived in the American West, Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He studied Spanish history, receiving his PhD from the University of Toronto. Fynn-Paul conducts historical research in eight languages including Spanish, Latin, Catalan, French, Italian, Dutch, and German, plus his native English. The author of dozens of scholarly books and articles, Fynn-Paul won the 2016 European History Quarterly Prize. He co-edits a book series on global slavery and is area editor for the Journal of Global Slavery. A popular teacher who teaches students from over 50 countries, Fynn-Paul is a professor of Economics and Global History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Founded in 1575, Leiden is that country's oldest university and one of the top research institutions in Europe. Having an international perspective has helped Fynn-Paul to appreciate the beauty—and fragility—of his home country of the United States, including its people, its democracy, and its cultural heritage.