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 and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford University.

Among the topics his work has covered 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 European Union in its relationships with partners such as the United States and rising non-Western powers such as China. His most recent book is Facts are Subversive: Political Writing From a Decade Without a Name (2009) and he is the editor of Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present (2009).

He is the author of eight previous books: Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West (2004); 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); 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 George Orwell Prize, 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.