James Robinson is a University Professor at the Harris School for Public Policy, one of only 8 University Professors at the University of Chicago. He studied economics at the London School of Economics, the University of Warwick and Yale University and before coming to Chicago taught in the Departments of Government, Economics, History, and Human and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. His main research interests are in comparative development. He is co-author with Daron Acemoglu of Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy and Why Nations Fail, which has been translated into 35 languages including Arabic, Dari, Farsi and Mongolian. Their next book, The Narrow Corridor to Liberty, will be published by Penguin in 2019. He currently conducts research in Bolivia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Haiti and in Colombia where he has taught for over 20 years during the summer at the University of the Andes in Bogotá.