An award-winning writer about the political transformation of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash is a professor of European studies at Oxford University where he is also Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College. He is the former director, and now honorary chair, of St. Antony’s European Studies Centre. Since 1990, he also has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books, and he writes a weekly column for the Guardian, which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia, and North America. Professor Garton Ash read modern history at Oxford and took both a B.A. and M.A. there. He studied first at St. Antony’s and then did further graduate work at the Free University in West Berlin and at Humboldt University in East Berlin as part of his ongoing research into the German resistance to Hitler. After living in the then divided city for several years, he traveled widely behind the Iron Curtain. Throughout the 1980s, he reported on and analyzed the emancipation of central Europe from communism, and for two years, he served as an editorial writer on central European affairs for the London Times. He was also foreign editor of the Spectator and a columnist for the Independent. Professor Garton Ash went to Washington, D.C. as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 1986-87. The next year, he conducted a research project on Ostpolitik at St. Antony’s and was appointed to its Senior Research Fellowship in Contemporary History in 1990. He directed St. Antony’s European Studies Centre for six years. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society, and the Royal Society of Arts, Professor Garton Ash is a corresponding fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He was recognized as Commentator of the Year in 1989, and he is the recipient of the David Watt Memorial Prize, the Premio Napoli, the Imre Nagy Memorial Plaque, the Hoffmann von Fallersleben Prize, and the Order of Merit of three countries—Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. In addition, he is a commander of the British Order of St. Michael and St. George. His eight books, all presenting a compelling history of the present, include, in addition to an early work in German: The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (1983), which won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (1989), for which he was awarded the Prix Européen de l’Essai; We the People: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (1990), his witness to epochal events that was published in the United States as The Magic Lantern and translated into fifteen languages; In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (1993), named Political Book of the Year in Germany; The File: A Personal History (1997), a memoir that has so far appeared in sixteen languages; History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (2000), and, most recently, Free World, which was published by Penguin in 2004, and presents the author’s vision of how the United States and Europe can collaborate to preserve the future of liberty in a dangerous world.