Avner Offer is an Israeli-British Jewish economic historian, Chichele Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) based in the United Kingdom. He holds the Chichele Professorship Emeritus at Oxford, paired with emeritus fellowships at Oriel College and Nuffield College, Oxford. Offer’s research centers on 19th- and 20th-century international economic history, the economic causes of the First World War, the psychological and social costs of affluence and consumerism, the measurement of human well-being, housing and land welfare regimes, and the history of economic thought.
Throughout his academic tenure, Offer has focused on the intersection of economic history, behavioral economics, and social welfare, publishing foundational scholarly monographs including The Challenge of Affluence: Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1945, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation, and The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2000.
He was also a co-signer of “An Open Letter from Concerned Jewish Faculty at the University of Oxford.” The open letter stated: As we write, the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel immediately to halt its assault on Rafah in order to safeguard Palestinians’ right to be protected from acts of genocide. We are deeply proud of the Oxford students, many of them Jewish, who have stood in solidarity with the international student movement protesting a war that has killed thousands of university teachers and students and leveled every single university in Gaza. As Jews, as educators, and as human beings, we stand with them.