Timothy Garton Ash
Senior Fellow

Expertise: Contemporary European history and politics

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Timothy Garton Ash, an internationally acclaimed contemporary historian whose work has focused on Europe since 1945, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Garton Ash is in residence at Hoover on a part-year basis; at the same time he continues to hold his appointments as professor of European studies, director of the European Studies Centre, and the Gerd Bucerius Senior Research Fellow in Contemporary History, all at St. Antony's College, Oxford University.

Among the topics his work covers are the emancipation and eventual liberation of Central Europe from communism, the eastern policy of Germany and its reunification, how countries deal with a difficult past, the role of intellectuals in politics, and the relationship between the European Union and the larger Europe. His recent research has focused on relations between Europe and America, as both are faced with the global challenges of the early twenty-first century. This is the subject of his latest book, Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West (2004). (See also www.freeworldweb.net.)

He is the author of seven previous books: History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (1999); The File: A Personal History (1998); In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (1993); The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 as Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (1990); The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (1989); The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 1980–82 (1983); and Und Willst Du Nicht Mein Brüder Sein . . . Die DDR Heute (1981).

Garton Ash is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society, and the Royal Society of Arts and a member of several prestigious editorial boards.

He has also received numerous honors and awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Order of Merit from Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, and an honorary doctorate from St. Andrew's University, the oldest university in Scotland.

He writes a regular column in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated in Europe, the Americas and and Asia. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Garton Ash, who holds a B.A. and M.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford, studied at the graduate level at St. Antony's College, Oxford, at the Free University in West Berlin, and at Humboldt University in East Berlin.