Timothy Garton Ash, an internationally acclaimed contemporary historian who focuses on European affairs since 1945, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ash is in residence at Hoover on a part-year basis, while continuing his appointment as Kurt A. Körber Senior Research Fellow in contemporary European history at the European Studies Center of St. Antony’s College at 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 that country’s eventual reunification, how countries deal with a difficult past, the relationship of intellectuals to politics, and the relationship between the European Union and the larger Europe.

He is the author of six books: History of the Present: Essays and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (1999); The File (1998); In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (1993); We the People: 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); and The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 1980-82 (1983).

Garton Ash is a fellow of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Arts. He is a governor of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, and a member of several prestigious editorial boards. He has also received numerous honors and awards for distinguished scholarship including the Somerset Maugham Award, the Friederich Ebert Stiftung Prize, and the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany. He also frequently writes for leading newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Garton Ash holds two degrees in modern history from Exeter College, Oxford, and studied at the graduate level at St. Antony’s College, at the Free University in West Berlin, and at Humboldt University in East Berlin.