John Ulric Nef (economic historian)

John Ulric Nef (1899–1988) was an American economic historian, and the co-founder of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. He was associated with the University of Chicago for over half a century, and co-founded the Committee there in 1941.

Nef was born in 1899. He was a native Chicagoan. He graduated from Harvard University in 1920. He finished a PhD degree at the Robert Brookings Graduate School in Washington, D.C. (a precursor of the Brookings Institution) in 1927. He served at Swarthmore College's faculty for a year. He joined the University of Chicago's faculty in 1929 as an assistant professor of economics.

After joining the faculty at Chicago in 1929, he was associated with the university for over half a century. He became professor of economic history there in 1936.

He also served as a visiting professor at French universities, Institut d'études politiques and the Collège de France, and also lectured at the universities of Belfast and Houston.

In 1941 Nef co-founded the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago along with Frank Knight, Robert Redfield, and Robert M. Hutchins (who was then president of the University of Chicago). It is an elite interdisciplinary graduate department at Chicago. He served as executive secretary and also as chairman (1945–1964) of the Committee. He brought a number of distinguished people he had encountered in his travels abroad such as Marc Chagall, T. S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, and Jacques Maritain to the Committee.

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