Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash
Born	12 July 1955 (1955-07-12) London
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Oxford

Timothy Garton Ash (born 12 July 1955) is a British historian, author and commentator. He is currently serving as Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. Much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe. He has written about the Communist dictatorships of that region, their experience with the secret police, the Revolutions of 1989 and the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc states into member states of the European Union. He has examined the role of Europe in an increasingly post-Western world and the challenge of combining freedom and diversity—especially in relation to free speech. He also writes a widely syndicated weekly column on international affairs. In January 2012, he launched Free Speech Debate, a multi-lingual web project to research free speech norms in the age of the internet and mass migration.

Education

Garton Ash was educated at Sherborne School, an independent school for boys in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset in South West England, followed by Exeter College at the University of Oxford, where he studied Modern History. For post-graduate study, he went to St. Antony's College, Oxford, and then, in the still divided Berlin, the Free University in West Berlin and the Humboldt University in East Berlin.

Life and career

In the 1980s, Garton Ash was Foreign Editor of The Spectator and a columnist for The Independent. He became a Fellow at St Antony's College in 1989, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution in 2000, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford in 2004. He has written a weekly column in The Guardian since 2004 and is a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books. His column is also translated in the Turkish daily Radikal.

Personal life

He and his wife Danuta live predominantly in Oxford, although also in Stanford. They have two sons.

Bibliography

• Und Willst Du Nicht Mein Bruder Sein...Die DDR Heute (Rowohlt, 1981) ISBN 3-499-33015-6
• The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 1980–82 (Scribner, 1984) ISBN 0-684-18114-2
• The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (Random House, 1989) ISBN 0-394-57573-3
• The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of 1989 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (Random House, 1990) ISBN 0-394-58884-3
• In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (Random House, 1993) ISBN 0-394-55711-5
• The File: A Personal History (Random House, 1997) ISBN 0-679-45574-4
• History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (Allen Lane, 1999) ISBN 0-7139-9323-5
• Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (Random House, 2004) ISBN 1-4000-6219-5
• Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name (Atlantic Books, 2009) ISBN 1848870892

Awards and Honours

• Prix Européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon (1989)
• Somerset Maugham Award
• Order of Merit from the Czech Republic
• Order of Merit from Germany
• Order of Merit from Poland
• Honorary doctorate from St. Andrew's University, Scotland
• CMG
• George Orwell Prize
• Kullervo Killinen -prize from Finland (2006)
• Honorary doctorate from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

See also

• European Council on Foreign Relations
• Appel de Blois
• Salon

External links

• Official Website
• Articles by Timothy Garton Ash at Journalisted
• Column archives at The Guardian
• Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Timothy Garton Ash on Charlie Rose
• Works by or about Timothy Garton Ash in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Garton Ash on Facts Are Subversive
• In dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi
• Stanford public lecture
• Free Speech Debate