Hoover Institution senior fellow Timothy Garton Ash, who is also a professor of European Studies and the Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, will speak on his new book, Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World, on October 5 at Stanford University.
Free Speech is the latest of Garton Ash’s many books on politics, history, and society that have been published in six different languages. Garton Ash regularly writes columns for the Guardian and is a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books. Time magazine featured him in its 2005 “Time 100” list of influential people. In the article accompanying the distinction, Niall Ferguson, also a senior fellow at Hoover, wrote “[s]helves are where most works of history spend their lives. But the kind of history Garton Ash writes is more likely to lie on the desks of the world’s decision makers.”
Recently Garton Ash has focused his scholarly energies on the study of free speech: an issue closely linked to the many events, cultures, and institutions that he has studied and experienced firsthand in his work.
He leads a project at the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom at St Antony’s College, Oxford, freespeechdebate.com, which provides content in thirteen languages exploring modern debates around free speech.
His new book explores the protection of freedom of speech—and the ends society intends it to serve—in the radically transformed world of modern communications. It puts forth, as the book’s description states, “a framework for civilized conflict in a world where we are all becoming neighbors.”
Garton Ash spoke about the book at a recent Hoover Institution in Washington event titled “Free Speech in a Connected World,” which also featured a panel discussion with Tom Malinowski, assistant secretary of state for human rights, democracy, and labor, along with Freedom House president Mark Lagon. Video from that event can be viewed here.
On Tuesday, October 5, 2016, Garton Ash will again speak about the book, this time at a Stanford University event hosted by the university’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. The Hoover Institution is a cosponsor of the event, as are Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Digital Civil Society Lab at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
The event is free and open to the public; books will be available for purchase and signing by the author.
Garton Ash will also participate in a discussion seminar with Apple University faculty Joshua Chen and Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School on Wednesday, October 6.
More information about both events can be found here.
