Gilles Bransbourg is currently a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He served previously as Executive Director of the American Numismatic Society in New York between 2019 and 2024. Gilles won the French nationwide Concours Général award in History at the age of 17 in 1982 and then studied Economics, Mathematics and Statistics in Paris at Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, École Polytechnique, Sciences Po and École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique from 1983 to 1990. He became a market economist, then specialized in financial derivatives, and held executive positions in the banking sector. He stepped down from his last position in 2005, in order to engage fully with his lifelong passion, history.
By 2010, Bransbourg had completed a PhD in History at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
He joined NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in 2009, first as a Visiting Research Scholar and then Research Associate since 2012, and the American Numismatic Society in 2011 in the curatorial department. He curated the exhibition Signs of Inflation at The Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2012, and supervised the implementation of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Online Coins of the Roman Empire. Since 2022, Gilles is affiliated with IRAMAT, CNRS-Université d’Orléans, as Chercheur Associé and, since 2023, with the CNRS unit, Collège de France-located ‘Monde Byzantin’ as Chercheur Associé.
His research deals with comparative economic and monetary history. He has published extensively in a range of academic journals, conference proceedings, and books, co-authoring “ La Politique Monétaire de l'Euro” (2009), providing the Later Roman Empire chapter to W. Scheidel and A. Monson (ed.), “Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States” (2015), and a renewed analysis of the Later Roman Empire’s monetary and fiscal overhaul in K. Butcher (ed.), “Debasement: Manipulation of Coin Standards in Pre-Modern Monetary Systems” (2020). Among numerous contributions to economic history, he has published “Rome and the Economic Integration of Empire” as ISAW Papers 3 (2012), « Capital in the Sixth Century: the Dynamic of Tax and Estate in Egypt » in Journal of Late Antiquity (2016), "The Roman Coinage under the Antonines revisited: an Economy of Silver, not Gold", in M. Lavan, D. Jew, B. Danon (ed.), The Uncertain Past, Cambridge University Press (2022), “Gold or silver standard: choice or necessity? The middle class and fifth-century collapse of the Roman silver coinage”, in Revue Belge de Numismatique (2022); and "Les voies de la Peste. L’apport des papyrus", in Comptes rendus des séances de l’année 2023. Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. In 2019, he coauthored with Roger Bagnall, as ISAW Papers 14 (2019), “The Constantian Monetary Revolution.”, subsequently published by the IFAO in Cairo, and, in 2021, with Roger Bagnall and Irene Soto, “State Collection of Bronze in Early Fourth-Century Egypt”, in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
A frequent contributor to academic colloquiums and conferences, he has been invited for a residency at the American Academy in Rome in early 2023.
In 2015, Gilles Bransbourg was made a knight in the French Order of the Palmes Académiques. With the French Consulate in New York, he has contributed to the establishment of an English-French dual language curriculum in New York public schools.
Photo credit: Andrea Kane, Institute for Advanced Study