Kevin O'Rourke is a Professor of Economics at Trinity College Dublin, and a co-organiser of the CEPR's Economic History Initiative, which aims to promote a more 'presentist', quantitative and comparative approach to European economic history. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1989, and has taught at Columbia, Harvard, University College Dublin and Sciences Po Paris. He has served as an editor of the European Review of Economic History, and as an editorial board member of the Journal of Economic History and World Politics. He is President-elect of the European Historical Economics Society. He has written extensively on the history of globalization, and his Globalization and History (co-authored with Jeffrey G. Williamson) won the 1999 American Association of Publishers/PSP Award for the best scholarly book in economics.

Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium, co-authored with Ronald Findlay, was published by Princeton University Press in 2007, and has been widely reviewed. In his spare time, Kevin serves as a municipal counsellor in St Pierre d'Entremont, a small mountain village in France.